Distilling Down
by RunsfromReality
Summary: Seeking a vaccine for vampirism, Edward and Carlisle created another type of monster - someone they love who can't remember how to be anything but deadly. With love, science, and murder in the air, the ultimate outcome is anyone's guess. OOC/AU/Vamps
1. Prologue: Rocks & Waves

**~: Prologue :~  
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I laid back against the rocks and waited for the sun to come up. Gradually my hair dried, and I idly picked at the stiff, salted folds of the tuxedo jacket in my lap.

Tonight's adventures had been seriously disturbing, to say the least. I'd been scared, shot at, and chased. Chased! It was quite a bit to pack into a single evening.

As I waited, I thought that while I didn't need recovery time per se, I did need time to think. His jacket had held everything I'd expected, as well as three things that scared me and one that had me disturbed because it was just so . . . odd.

The keys and the cell phone I had fished out of his pockets had been summarily lobbed away into the water. No need for those, not on my end of things. The money would come in handy. The three little vial darts I had held up individually, suspiciously, and carefully. Why would he carry these around? They frightened me, but I didn't want to leave them behind, either.

The picture, on the other hand . . . .the picture was strange. It was obviously special to him, worn, folded, and wrinkled even before it had been wet. Yet despite the dampness and the dim light, it still looked like me.

Staring at it, I saw my same smile staring back at me. The very same smile I saw in the mirror in the mornings was right there, only bigger. Family? Some sibling of mine, perhaps? It could be my twin, but it couldn't be me.

First of all, I was never that happy. Secondly, until the Volturi had approached me to approach him, I had never been with him. The girl in this photo was practically glowing in his casual embrace.

Sighing, I put the photo back in the jacket pocket with the vial darts and the money. I needed a new plan, a new tactic, a new . . .life. Something was going on in this one that I didn't like, and I needed to figure out what it was and how to fix it before someone else set me up to die on their behalf.


	2. Chapter 1: Bells in the Woods

**Many thanks to Project Team Beta!**

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~: Bells in the Woods :~  
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Six months later, I was working the bar in St. Petersburg.

Actually, I was working _the bars_ of St. Petersburg_._ When you don't need sleep and you're afraid to be alone, why not have multiple jobs? I would need the money if I really had to go to ground for an extended period of time, and the bars were good hunting ground. Especially since I was trying to be discrete.

There was one bar where I did no hunting at all, out of respect. I'd been shocked to find the place still open. Even more shocked when Arkady had walked out for a smoke and spotted me having my moment of nostalgia.

"Tatyana," he said, eyes big. "It's you. You age not one day."

"Of course not. I don't smoke those filthy cigarettes."

He laughed. "You and my doctor both. Nags." He shook his head. Shrugged. "Still, I survive."

I smiled. Arkady was nothing if not a survivor. He was ancient, wizened, and looked like the next gust of wind from the canals was going to take him out permanently. He had looked that way since Petersburg was Leningrad.

"So ," he said, "you are back now for how long?"

"I'm not back at all, Arkady. Just passing through. A ghost in the wind."

"Tanya," he chided, using my old nickname, "I am too old for lies. Besides, you can work for me. Clean, cook. Like old times. But better. Come, have a look. I have a new kitchen." He took my arm and pulled me toward the door.

"Ech, Arkady," I protested, but it was too late. He was strong for an old man, and I was afraid of hurting him.

Somehow, that one moment of weakness had turned into four days and two nights a week at his bar/bistro. I kept myself busy polishing glasses, washing dishes, and cooking the pelmeni. Word had gotten around about those little bundles of dough and meat that I stuffed, and the old men shuffled out of the woodwork to congratulate Arkady on resurrecting his old cook for the second time. I was a living legend. They didn't seem to care how I knew their names, how much hair they'd lost, or what they'd looked like in their 40's, as long as in their 60's I still flirted, teased them, and served them their food.

And Arkady, bless him, let me keep a room in the back and paid me in cash. No questions. It was the survivor's way. I was grateful to have found an old friend, so I behaved myself very well in his presence. After all, he had saved me from having to find a place, fill out forms, and explain why I had three passports, not one of which was made out in the name of either the Tatyana or the Tanya he knew.

~:~:~:~

At the other bars I worked, it was different. Arkady's was in the suburbs; it was a modest affair set down into the basement with rich dark woods creating a sanctuary against the outside world. The bars downtown were discos catering to the young and the restless. The drunk and the drugged ogled me in the strobe lights as I served drinks. The unlucky ones fell for my charms.

Having them paw after me was annoying, but at least if I left with a customer, people made all the wrong assumptions I needed to cover my tracks. I liked the really drunk and high ones, because then when I sipped on them, they could pretend I'd been a bad date, a bad dream . . . anything but a bad vampire.

~:~:~:~

Late nights at Arkady's meant that it was ten o'clock and he was closed, but still full. His old friends liked to come in for a beer after dinner, to chat, and to eat more food. There were several with no one left at home, and they came every night to tease and reminisce.

They treated me alternately like a daughter and a prospect, scolding and pinching, laughing and leering. The only times I hid from them were during games of "I remember." I would go in the back to wash up, find something to clean, or just hide.

Tonight, I was caught when Demetri ordered more pelmenis. He liked them with spiced pork and potato, folded just so in that way I'd learned from Rose. I could smell his upcoming death, so I indulged him far too much by making dishes for him after the kitchen was officially closed. What harm was there in providing a few creature comforts to an old man with a hard life who would die soon anyway?

The harm was in his questions. This night, he was asking for firsts from the small huddle of ancients at his table. "Tatyana," he exclaimed as I was bringing out their latest beers, "who was your first real love? One of us, hmmm?" They laughed and I laughed. Then I quickly ducked back into the kitchen to finish his pelmenis without answering his question.

When I came back, they were arguing over some girl they had all known and forgotten. Demetri was whining. "Time steals everything. All the details."

"Not from me!" protested Arkady. "I remember everything."

"Oh?" asked Demetri. "What's the first thing you remember, eh?"

"It was warm and dark, and I was sleeping. Then, somebody was squeezing me. Pulling me. Suddenly, it was so bright, and then he hit me."

"Who hit you?"

"The doctor, of course!" They laughed at that, and I joined them. I had just turned to go when Demetri asked me, "What's the first thing you remember, Tanya?"

"Bells," I said. "Bells in the woods." They looked puzzled at this, but it was only partly a lie.

~:~:~:~

The truth was that I didn't remember anything of my life before I became a vampire. I didn't even remember much about my first days as a vampire. Or months. Or years. I didn't _know_.

I just remembered the woods. At first, everything was the woods, and I was just another creature in the trees. There was a town, but I stayed away. The people smelled good, but I stayed away. Even now, I couldn't tell you why, but there was plenty to eat in the woods.

I was eating one day when unexpectedly, I was sharing my space. I'm sure I looked feral as I glared over the body of the downed deer at the wolf. I snarled, it growled, and then suddenly it wasn't a wolf anymore.

I scrambled back against the nearest tree in pure shock as the wolf stretched his long, muscular, _human_ arms. He had thick black hair cut short with muscles _everywhere_, and no trace of a tan line on all his nut-brown nude glory. He blinked his eyes, shaking out the last of the wolf in him as I stared, suddenly conscious that I wasn't wearing anything either.

It was exciting, and new. Until that moment, I had known only woods, and wild, and smells of people not to be eaten. I had not known wolf-men who stared at me intently.

"Bells," he said. I didn't hear anything. I cocked my head to listen, but all I could hear was the wind and his heartbeat. It was fast, hard, strong, and speeding up.

"Bells," he said again, and stepped toward me. I hissed and pressed back against the tree but didn't run. The wind had brought me his scent and he smelled _**delicious**_.

"You surprised me," he said. "I thought you were something else, and I couldn't smell you, so I came to look. I didn't think I would ever see you here again."

Again? I didn't remember being here the first time, but watching his muscles ripple as he eased his way over to me in an oh-so-non-threatening manner, I didn't understand how I could forget. It was clear that he thought I was going to run from him, but he didn't realize that I had smelled him and wanted him. I just stayed put and watched him. It was a nice view, and it was easier than chasing him later.

"They told me to watch, and I've been watching. But there was never any sign, never any letter. I missed your letters," he breathed softly, right in front of me now. He placed one hand gently on the tree beside me, reaching for my hands holding the tree behind my back. With the other hand, he brushed my hair out of my face and cupped my chin. "I missed you."

We just looked at each other for a moment, long and deep. His hand turned from the tree to my back and he pulled me infinitesimally closer to him. I could smell that he was male, and he was happy, and he was strong. I closed my eyes as I inhaled again, and he inched me closer to him. I could smell that he was loyal, but he was longing for something, and he was lonely.

When his lips met mine, the kiss was soft and tentative. I think he thought I would bolt, but I had no intention of leaving. I _was_ trembling like a leaf in the wind, but that was just the excitement running through me. I kissed him back, my eyes open now, in unfamiliar territory but trusting my instincts. With no memories of him to guide me, they were all I had.

He gave a low moan and pulled me even closer, wrapping his arms around me and sinking his hands into my hair. He cuddled me close into the warm planes of his chest, and I pulled my hands from behind my back to hold him.

Hold him in place, that is. I didn't want _him_ to run away either.

He started running his hands down my back and kissing the top of my head. I could feel his heart beating through the hard muscles of his chest, and I planted one gentle kiss there, flicking my tongue softly over his pulse. He was talking into my hair between kisses, something about mistakes and tribes and never again. I didn't understand any of that nonsense, so I did what I wanted to do. I pivoted him up against the tree and bit him right over his heart.

He was shocked, I think. The animals always were. I pressed my whole body against his and drank. He tasted like strength and duty with a spice of something exotic and unknowable.

I pulled long and hard at his blood and his spirit. His shock wore off and he struggled, but I was strong, too, and getting stronger by the minute. I held him there against the tree and fed, stopping only when I felt a strange sensation twisting against my stomach.

I pulled back to look and was stunned to see fur creeping over his skin. When he'd appeared he'd been a man instantly, but now his wolf skin was flowing like a strange wave out from his stomach and down over his legs. His body drooped as his limbs shifted and I backed away, confused, repulsed, and frightened.

His wide eyes stared at me, dark in his newly bloodless face. He looked shrunken, as if something had taken the spirit right out of him, and not even his fur blanket could cover that up.

"Bells," he choked out weakly. Dropping forward onto his hands and knees as his wolf skin took him over, he was clearly struggling with his changing shape. Blood dripped slowly from the wound in his chest onto the ground. He whimpered at it, a completely animal noise that sounded wrong coming from his still-human face. He was obviously very badly hurt, while I felt . . . fine. Better than I'd felt for . . . as long as I could remember.

I could still smell the essence of him. It wasn't all gone yet, and I wanted the last dregs of it. His eyes closed and I leaned toward him, aiming for a spot on his back that wasn't furred over yet.

I was almost there when he felt my shadow and his head popped up, connecting with mine. The force of the blow knocked me back over the deer that still lay there, discarded. I fell hard but scrambled up, shocked, and stared into his eyes.

They looked haunted, and the light in them was fading. They accused me of things I didn't want to acknowledge. I reached toward him but he snarled, all teeth and anger and hurt and sadness as his face shifted into a long snout and the tone of his eyes changed to yellow.

Then he fell over, and lay still.

I reached over and touched him tentatively, unable to think of him as an animal now but feeling only fur under my fingertips. The man was gone.

Around him in the forest, a howl went up. It was long, mournful, and too close to be safe. I stood and took one last look at the crumpled fur body. Then the other wolf howled again, and I ran away like the monster I was.

~:~:~:~

Arkady had come back to the bar with me, and stood for a moment watching me wash the dishes with an uncharacteristic fierceness in the sink behind the counter.

"You don't have to wash them by hand, you know. I have a machine now."

I shrugged at him and scrubbed harder. "I was just thinking of what happened after I heard my bells."

"Ah," he said. "Well, some men are like that. Make you feel lost, wild, like nothing. But, you know what?"

"What?" I replied, not at all sure where he was going with this. No one knew that story; how did he know it had been a man? Arkady was an insightful bastard like that.

"All you need," he said, winking and leering, "is a new man to bring you back." He pinched my cheek and the other old men at the bar hooted. I rolled my eyes good-naturedly and went back to scrubbing, less fiercely. I hadn't needed another man at all. I'd just needed the child.

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**Author's Note: Review me, alert me, or favorite me . . . I'll be eternally grateful and share teasers for the next installment!**


	3. Chapter 2: Tables in the Wall

**Many thanks to Project Team Beta, and apologies to SMeyer.**

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**Chapter 2:

TABLES IN THE WALL

_Chicago, Alice's POV_

Our resident temperamental child, Edward, stormed back in from the lab and plopped himself down at the table.

"News?" he asked, in his usual hostile tone.

"None," I replied. "She's being quiet, wherever she is."

"That is not a good sign, Alice."

Rather than respond, I just looked over at Jasper, who was leaning his angular bones wearily against the kitchen counter. We had arrived back in Chicago that morning, worn out from another scouting tour. The eight missing people Edward had flagged were just that—missing people. They hadn't been buried, dropped in canals, or abandoned in their basements. One of them was even still alive. Two of them were so far off her usual victim profile list that I was disturbed that he'd even wanted us to check them out. Then again, Edward was losing his mind, so I was inclined to forgive him.

Inclined. Not actually going to, though. We'd been through almost 70 years of this kind of crap, off and on, and I'd had enough. Edward was as a good as family, but even for family, there's only so much crazy you can tolerate before you draw the line.

"I've made another list. There's a family in Poland and—"

"Edward, no."

He glared at me. I glared right back at him from my spot against the wall. Shoulder blades nestled firmly against the wall, I shifted my gun to the front so I could cross my arms and communicate my frustration with him more effectively. He narrowed his eyes, far too accustomed to getting his way on all things Bella related. I set my jaw and we both ratcheted up the hostility level.

Jasper let us work at it for a minute before lighting the fuse on the situation. "Edward, we don't think she is in Europe anymore. It's doubtful that she's here in America. If she is in Canada she can't hide forever, and the wolves will let us know when they spot her so we don't need to hunt there. If she is in Russia or China or India the networks are so poor it could be years before any of her kills hit our radar. Or she could sit out in Australia eating bushmen and we would never find out. We've done everything we can do at this point, Edward. We are wearing ourselves out and our cover story thin chasing down every hare-brained suspicion you have. It has to stop. For all we know she's dead."

There was a slow count of ten, and then Edward threw the kitchen table into the wall. The four chairs followed it with perfect precision, alternately shattering and embedding bits of themselves into the wallpaper. He flexed his hands and started breathing deeply as he watched the splinters settle.

Hey genius, I thought, you're supposed to meditate _before_ you lose your temper.

Edward had been vamped just long enough to hear my thoughts again if they were directed at him. When he snarled like that, it was hard to remember he'd ever been a nice guy. I was glad he was out of furniture to throw.

Jasper cleared his throat to refocus Edward's attention away from further kitchen destruction. "We are negotiating a very delicate balance with the Volturi, and it takes concentration. Focus. Precision. It does not take being in a plane forty hours a week. Do you understand?"

I willed him to understand. The planes we used were very nice, very luxurious, and very much small, enclosed spaces. I'd spent enough time in small, enclosed spaces before Edward and Carlisle came to fish me out of them, and while my gratitude to them for that rescue had kept me close ever since, it wasn't going to be enough to keep me climbing back in those zippy little traps much longer.

I'd never do it for them if I didn't owe them so much. Only Jasper knew how much it was costing me right now to play this game, and I didn't want to play that card on top of everything else Mr. Raging Brooder was dealing with. I just wanted him to understand that he was being irrational and that he needed to try to let it go before Bella made us _all_ crazy.

Edward just kept up his deep breathing, eyes flickering between Jasper and I before he finally turned and walked stiffly out of the room.

I looked over at Jasper. "That went well, don't you think?"

Jasper shook his head. "Go save my lamps, I've had them since the Depression."

However, Edward wasn't throwing Jasper's precious Art Deco lamps across the living room or putting the sofa through the French doors. Instead, he was just standing, looking at the wall, hands clasped firmly behind his back.

Our pictures hung in a scattered array, showcasing our lives since we'd come to America. There were dozens of Jasper and I from our courtship, our wedding, and our trips together. Dozens of happy moments were on display, but Edward had eyes for only one: Bella at the lakeshore.

She had been notoriously camera shy as a human, so we'd never had many of her. Between the labs and houses that had been bombed and burned over the years, his personal collection had been winnowed down to just a few lingering snapshots. He'd lost the other one when she'd stolen his jacket on her way out the door again two years ago, so now this one on our wall was all he had.

Well, that and his not-so-little obsession with her current whereabouts.

"Edward . . . " I said to him softly, putting one hand tentatively on his shoulder. He didn't move. "She'll turn up when it's time and not a minute before."

"How can she run from me? How can she hide?" His voice was pure agony, bottled, aged well, and decanted.

"Edward, you know she's not herself right now." I left out the part about him chasing her around shooting at her as potential motivation for wanting to hide out. He killed himself enough over that as it was, and Jasper _really_ liked those lamps.

Mr. Perfect Shot had missed his ladylove an unprecedented 11 times before he gave up and just threw the gun in after her. That hadn't worked, either, and it had kicked off the return of his nasty habit of throwing things around when he was upset. Most of the tables in the house came from Ikea now, and Jasper was just tempting fate with those stupid glass lamps of his.

"Edward," I started again, but he shook his head and shrugged my hand off his shoulder.

"I know she's not dead. She's out there, somewhere, doing God knows what to God knows who. And I can't stop that, because I can't find her. I can't find her, Alice, and I can't live like this. I have to know where she is. I need to be able to make things right."

"You'll just have to get used to disappointment," said Jasper from behind us, a lamp cradled in each arm as he walked back toward the basement. Needling Edward when he was holding his precious antique lamps was really begging for trouble, but Edward just went back to staring at Bella's face on the wall, as if he could will it to speak to him and tell him where she was. Eventually, I left him to it, and went to clean up what was left of the kitchen.

Ikea was on speed dial these days, and since I was already on my knees, I sent up a silent prayer that Bella, wherever she was, would turn up soon.

~:~:~:~

Edward was still staring at the wall the next morning when Carlisle got in. He'd skipped the lab, and Carlisle's eyebrows went up at the new table in the kitchen.

"No news?" It was a rhetorical question, really. We both knew that if Bella had been sighted, we wouldn't be dealing with the King of Catatonic in the living room.

"Jasper told him we're calling off the hunt, pending new developments."

"Ah, well. That explains the redecorating." He gestured lightly at the table and the new wainscoting on the wall. I hadn't been able to get the splinters out, and I thought wood paneling would be able to handle more of an impact. It was worth a shot, right?

"Actually, I thought he took the news fairly well."

Behind me, Jasper snorted. I turned and narrowed my eyes at him. He gave me a wide-eyed and innocent look. Carlisle wasn't fooled.

"I need Edward functional and in the lab working on the new formula, not tearing up your home." He gestured broadly at the table, the new doors, the fresh windows, and all the other home improvements we'd undertaken since the return of He Who Must Not Be Irked. "Unfortunately, in his present state, he's not safe for the lab environment either."

"What do you suggest?" asked Jasper, coming to stand beside me. Carlisle was the de facto head of our "family", and he knew Edward under stress better than any of the rest of us ever would. He'd known him when he was human the first time, and been there for him as he adjusted to his new status.

"We may need to dose him."

"He's not going to like that," I pointed out. "He blames it for missing Bella and not being able to chase after her properly before. He wants to be ready to go at the drop of a hat now."

"True, but he's more destructive in his vampiric state." You couldn't argue with that, so none of us did. However, I still didn't like the idea of dosing him against his will.

"What about the dreams? Aren't you afraid he'll be more depressed? What if he tries to kill himself?"

Jasper leaned over and shushed me. "He won't try to kill himself as long as he thinks Bella is still alive. He'll wait for her forever."

"It's not right. We do everything so that people have choices, and it's taking his choice away."

Jasper threw up his hands and started to pace the kitchen. Carlisle sighed and lowered himself into one of the new chairs. I crossed my arms and stared at both of them, daring them to argue with me.

Everything we worked for, the whole mission of the company, the very essence of our task, was to provide people with a choice about how they lived even if they were already the undead. All of us had been made into vampires against our will, and we fought the Volturi to prevent it from happening to others. All the work in the lab now was focused on reversing the vampiric state, so that those who had been turned against their will could turn themselves back.

Unfortunately, it still wasn't a perfect formula. You felt human and had human weaknesses, but your body still wasn't fully human. The effects wore off over time and people switched back to their vampiric form with all the pain of the original transformation. The after effects messed with any special skills you'd developed in your vampiric state. Still, for those of us who hadn't gotten to choose our fates, it provided the illusion of choice.

In fact, most of our customers worked to get a lifetime supply to that they could be permanently in the form of their choosing. There were some who liked to switch back and forth for the novelty of it all, but they were rare. The pain wasn't worth it, and neither was the lost equilibrium on both sides of the equation.

Edward and Carlisle worked constantly to improve the formula. After they'd pretty much perfected the neutralization for the venom we all carried, reversal of the vampiric state was their new holy grail. They dosed themselves off and on, testing their own supplies, but since they could work around the clock in their vampiric states they tended to stay vampy most of the time.

I could feel Carlisle taking advantage of his vamp state to probe my mind and I started reciting nursery rhymes in my head. He and Edward could both scan thoughts, and it was a sneaky way to win a fight.

"Jasper, a little help?"

Jasper acknowledged Carlisle's plea and stalked back over to me. "Alice, you know that we can't leave him standing out there."

"Why not? We don't use the living room much and he'll snap out of it eventually. I'll dust him if I have to. A statue is better than making him into something he doesn't want to be just because we can. That's Volturi thinking, and we're better than that."

Jasper and Carlisle winced together. It was a low blow, but true all the same. The good doctor and my handsome husband liked to think so, anyway. Some days I wasn't as sure.

"Alice-"Jasper started in, but another voice cut him off from the doorway.

"How could _you_ possibly dust _me_?"

"Stepstool," I replied primly. I may be short, but I am not without resources.

Edward laughed. He actually laughed. For the first time in months. Jasper and Carlisle smiled tentatively, wary of a suddenly cheerful brooder.

Leaning against the doorframe, Edward ran his hands through his hair and chuckled at them. "I pictured it in my head. Me, still standing there, and she was flicking me with that feather duster of hers and the little maid costume and—"

"Shut up about the maid costume!" Jasper growled. Neither of us would ever live down that particular Halloween adventure.

Edward grinned a minute longer, and then his mercurial mood snapped back to seriousness as he sat down at the table.

"Do you have the formula with you?"

Carlisle patted his jacket pocket and nodded. "I have samples of the new version that I wanted to show you, but you weren't in the lab."

"No, I was here. Being my usual self, as you can see." Edward gestured broadly at the new wainscoting and the table before laying his arm down on the table. He rolled his sleeve up. "Do it."

"Edward, are you sure this is what you really want?" Great move, Carlisle, I thought. _Now_ you grow a conscience. He heard that and shot me a look. Edward shot me a look, too.

"Alice, I won't be dusted. It's too ridiculous. Besides, Carlisle has a point. I'm needed in the lab."

"But what about—"He cut me off. No objections are permitted when Edward Cullen has chosen.

"Alice, as you said, she'll turn up when it's time and not a minute before." He turned back to Carlisle and made a fist, popping his veins. "Do it."

Carlisle pulled a dart pack out of his pocket and did it.

~:~:~:~

Later, when the initial spasms were over, Jasper and Carlisle put Edward to bed. Ikea had replacement chairs in stock and would bring them by tomorrow. The new formula was frightening to see in action, but Edward was already in a human state of exhaustion.

I started laying out Edward's coffee things for something to do besides fume. I still wasn't happy about the decision because I felt like we'd tricked him into it somehow. The least I could do was feed his human caffeine addictions.

Eventually, I noticed Jasper leaning in the doorway, watching me.

"What?" I asked, gesturing to espresso set on the counter. "He'll want coffee when he wakes up in the morning. It's the least I can do."

"He's British, Alice. He'll want tea."

"No, he's all-American boy now. No tea. Especially not after Italy. It's coffee all the way."

"As you like."

I straightened the set on the counter. Again.

"Alice, he'll be fine."

"We tricked him into this! He doesn't want to be human."

"Well, he doesn't want to be dusted, either."

I whirled around and stomped my foot angrily. "Do not mock this, Jasper Whitlock. It is not funny."

"You'll crack the tile, stomping around like that."

Scowling was the only worthy response I could muster. Jasper slid off the doorframe and came over to wrap me in his arms. "Alice, Edward doesn't want anything but Bella, and we can't give that to him."

"That doesn't excuse manipulating him."

Jasper sighed and tightened his grip around me. "You win, you win. Okay? Happy?"

"No," I muttered into his chest. "I want to fix this."

"There's no fixing it. There's only living with it."

"Don't quote Carlisle at me." He'd said the same thing to Edward a thousand times when Bella had first been turned.

"I say it because it's true. We can't fix Bella, and we can't fix Edward. We can only make him function a little until Bella pops up again."

"How can you be so sure she'll turn up? Especially after what we told Edward? We've looked for her everywhere."

"I'm not sure she'll turn up. But I am sure if she's alive we'll be able to track her down eventually." He was rubbing his hands up and down my back, soothing me. "And when her tracks get big enough, we'll follow them right to her door."

"But Bella doesn't even smell. And she never leaves tracks."

"No," he said, leading me out to den so he could cuddle me into the couch, "She doesn't smell, and she doesn't leave tracks. She leaves something much more obvious."

"Oh, yeah? Then why haven't we seen her mark, even though we've been looking for her almost non-stop?"

"We haven't given her enough time to pile them up," he said, plumping up his side of the cushions. We had an evening ritual of watching the sunset over the lake through the French doors in the den. It was calming, but I was still fussing at him even as I settled into the crook of his arm.

"Pile what up?"

"The same thing she always does, Alice. Bodies. Wherever she is, you know someone's dying."

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**AN: Many thanks to all my readers and reviewers! I treasure each of you. Comment, add me, or send me a message . . . I have teasers from the next installment . . . back in Bella's POV.**


	4. Chapter 3: Angels Out Of Church

**AN: I love everyone who has been reading and reviewing, and give my best regards to SMeyer for her characters.**

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**~: Chapter 3: ANGELS OUT OF CHURCH :~**

**_June 19th, St. Petersburg, BPOV_**

Arkady was finally dying.

I dropped my last coins into the box and listened as they piled up. I lit every candle in front of St. Jude's icon and prayed, just as I had for the last week. I was doubling up today, at his request. It was a last request, though he hadn't known it at the time.

He'd been coughing painfully all afternoon, and I could almost count the number of heartbeats he had left before the end. But I couldn't tell him that. Instead, I'd teased him gently in the hospital about his cigarettes again, and he'd just scowled as I'd hugged him goodnight. "You go pray for me twice, Tatyana. I need twice for that."

I'd done his regular church and then hunted out another one. It had been hard to find one that was open, since it was well after midnight, but I'd found one of the traditionalists and made my way inside out of the wind. It was June, and the half-light that passed for night could be chilly when the wind came off the water.

I didn't technically feel the chill, but the part of my brain that was human always registered the weather for me. Extreme temperatures I could feel, but more often the sensations of the weather were like phantom limbs. A part of me knew that the feeling should be there, and penciled it in where it was supposed to go.

That same part of my mind was penciling in denial about Arkady's death. I'd known he was dying long before he did, but how can you share something like that with someone so adamantly opposed to giving up on life? Or even explain how you know, almost to the minute, how much longer their fragile heart will beat?

I knew, and the doctors thought they knew. They were keeping him comfortable, which was all that they could do.

Arkady was not in the mood for dying. Of course, I had yet to find someone who was, ever, in the mood for dying. He'd asked me for my secret, but I'd stuck to my line about his cigarettes. He hadn't bought it, hadn't for years, but he did believe me when I said it wasn't something I could do to him. I'd told him the truth—I wasn't like the others who could share themselves and make a family. I was broken, somehow, and I couldn't save him. He'd squeezed my hand then, and sent me to pray.

Since then, it had become a daily routine. I think Arkady liked the idea of me in church, and there was a piece of me that found comfort in the old buildings with their benevolent icons looking down at the flickering flames. Those wobbling, smoking candles represented hopes and dreams for the kind of life I would never have, as much as I wished for it. Monsters like me don't get to keep their families.

I knelt in front of my candles and started through the prayers. Death was the worst kind of lost cause. I felt my eyes tensing up with the ghosts of tears at the thought of losing the only father figure I remembered. I couldn't even cry for him. What was the use of being alive forever if you had to do it alone? All the others I'd ever met could make more of their own kind, but my teeth just brought numbness and death. I was only good for killing people and destroying my own kind.

As the candles burned down, Arkady's wasn't the only lost soul I tried to bring to St. Jude's attention. Even after I knew his heart must have stopped, I kept praying for him and my life without him. Working in his bar had allowed me to build a life around the illusion of normalcy, and caring for him had given me the sense of purpose I so desperately needed now that I wasn't taking death orders. I didn't want to go back to simply being a hungry one on the loose.

I needed a cause, and I missed my old friends. It was frightening to think that I could lead the Volturi to them if I visited. I knew that just because I hadn't been found yet didn't mean I wasn't being hunted. I'd been lucky so far, but I'd been in one place too long. It was only a matter of time before I was found here. Yet how could I have left Arkady when he was so weak? And how could I leave now? Where would I go?

I was still on my knees in front of St. Jude when I heard the doors open behind me. Instinctively, I hid from whatever was being sent as an answer to my prayers.

The old woman came sobbing up to St. Jude's icon and reached for the matchbox before noticing that all of the candles were already lit. When the realization hit, she dropped to her knees and sobbed out her request. It was old, bad Russian, and it took me a minute to understand her hysterical pleas.

"They are just little girls! It's so horrible. Please that I may praise God with you and all the elect forever. I promise, O blessed St. Jude, to be ever mindful of this great favor, to always honor you as my special and powerful patron, and to gratefully encourage devotion to you. Amen. Most holy apostle, St. Jude, faithful servant and friend of Jesus, the Church honors and invokes you universally, as the patron of hopeless cases, of things almost despaired of. Pray for me, I am so hopeless and alone. Make use I implore you, of that particular privilege given to you, to bring visible and speedy help where help is almost despaired of. Come to my assistance in this great need that I may receive the consolation and help of heaven in all my necessities, tribulations, and sufferings, particularly for those girls. They are just little girls. They have them, I don't know what to do. I called the police and no one is coming and please and—"

She screamed when I touched her. I can only imagine what I looked like to her, looming over her in the dead of night, eyes black, hands cold, and my hair still wild from the wind.

"Where?"

She told me the address, frightened but resolute. "I can show you."

"No, stay here and pray. If they are alive, I will bring them here." She nodded, eyes wide.

To say I stormed out would imply I moved slowly. In moments like these, I was the wind.

**~:~:~:~:~:~**

Storming between the buildings and flying rooftop to rooftop to avoid being seen, I let the last pieces of my so-called life sweep away in the breeze. The old, familiar cold settled in around my heart. My father was dead, and eternity stretched out before me as far as the eye could see. Nothing to do except make it interesting, right?

I perched on the first window ledge I came to on the building she'd indicated. The sky was still summer pink, but the sun was gone and a purplish twilight was covering the streets. For what I wanted to do it would be better if it were darker. Unfortunately, it couldn't be helped.

The little hearts I could hear inside could, though. There were three of them, beating fast as hummingbirds. Surrounding them were older hearts, the pounding of their wakefulness standing out against the rhythmic symphony of sleeping beats that governed the rest of the complex. I was on the wrong side of the building, and I let my ear lead me to the window that I wanted.

Peeking around the corner, I couldn't see anything. The window was blocked with a thick curtain shutting out the light. Closing my eyes, I let my other senses take over.

I could smell the raw blood like it was almost under my tongue. Foul, bitter wine. My mouth watered anyway. I'd been skipping meals to spend more time with Arkady while he still had it. My thirst was so strong that even the prospect of soured blood made my stomach clench.

Lost in the smell of them, the shot startled me enough to make me crumble the brick underneath my hand as I snatched at the building to keep from falling. Angry, I stood up. How could I have been so careless as to let those bastards spot me? I hated being shot at and they would pay for that.

And yet the lousy shot had missed me completely even though I was right outside the window. Stupid humans. They couldn't even hit . . . wait.

Three hummingbird hearts. Pounding furiously, frightened. One older heartbeat was missing.

They hadn't been shooting at me after all.

I used my fingernails to pop out one pane of the window, and unhooked the latch stealthily. The window swung out, its progress hidden by the curtain. I could hear my hummingbirds pounding just inside, with the old beats further back. Maybe if I was lucky it would be a separate room and I could snatch them away without killing anyone.

_Nah. What fun would that be?_ I was going to kill them all.

Scenting the room, I knew they were alone when I slipped in behind the curtain. Three small girls were huddled together on a dirty bed, bruised and frightened. They were comforting each other, and not watching me. Their dim room didn't show much. I could hear their captors pacing around the rest of the apartment. I didn't have long.

I spoke to them softly in Russian. "I need you to close your eyes."

Instead, three pairs of eyes whipped toward the window. Kids these days, I swear. No respect for authority. Their hearts were pounding a mile a minute, and their curiosity still got the better of them.

"Who are you?" The oldest asked, clutching the two smaller girls into her torso, hiding their faces.

"I am Help Requested. Can you protect them?" She nodded. "Good. Hide under the bed, close your eyes, and don't open them again until I tell you it's okay." She stared. I snapped my fingers, making sparks. They scrambled under the bed and I twitched the bed sheets over the edge to hide them further.

As I moved to the door, I cast one last look over my shoulder at them, remembering the other thing. "Fingers in your ears, girls. It will be loud." I waited until I saw them comply. They wouldn't need these memories later to keep them up at night. The big one peeked at me and I shook my head at her, smiling sternly before opening the door and going out into the main room.

When I'm hungry, it never takes long.

******~:~:~:~:~:~**

Lady MacBeth had been right about blood. Once you got it on your hands, it was almost impossible to get out properly. Arkady's kitchen soap just wasn't doing the job, no matter how much I scrubbed. Out, damned spot, indeed.

I'd made a real mess of the apartment, and then gone trailing blood across half of St. Petersburg with the girls. Naturally, they had both peeked and listened as I'd raced them to the church. One of them had been sick from all the jumping between buildings, but they were alive and in one piece.

The granny had promised to get them back to their parents. Her blood smelled safe, and even though I would have liked to make other arrangements for them, I needed to get off the streets before full dawn to avoid attention. I knew I was a mess, but it wasn't until I got back here that I realized just how much blood I had all over me. My sweater was literally sopping with it. _Stupid, stupid, stupid._

Pulling it off, I managed to smear my face with blood. Again. My little room in the back of the bar reeked of blood, and there were drops all over the place. I'd be scrubbing for days to get rid of the nasty stench of dead evil around me, and I still needed to go back and get rid of the bodies. Angrily, I threw the sweater in the trash and bent over the sink to scrub my face again.

The thud on the floor behind me was someone I should have heard coming. Looking up into the mirror to see over my shoulder, I braced for the Volturi, but it was another shadow from my past that was standing just inside the open window.

"Tanya," he said, eyeing my exposed back, "you're looking well."

Coolly, I turned off the water and reached over for a towel. Drying my face, I looked him over, trying to decide what to do. Leaning back against the sink, I opted for playing it cool.

"James," I said. "You're looking exactly the same."

He laughed at that, continuing to give me the eye as I finished drying my face and mopped the water off my neck. Strands of blond hair floated out of his ponytail, touching gently down on the shoulders of his white linen shirt. Light colored pants and sandals completed the illusion of an Italian summer stepping into the room.

In fact, everything about his appearance seemed casual, summery, and calculated to reflect on our past together. I could see him lounging against the doorframe of the balcony of the apartment we'd shared, watching the sun go down while we got ready to hunt. Arguing with me over newspaper articles. Swimming with me in the bay. Pulling me into his arms . . . then disappearing for weeks or months and returning with orders. Always more orders.

"It's been a long time, James. What are you doing here?"

"I was in town, looking for something else, and I saw you. How could I resist?"

How indeed. I knew that blood trail had been a stupid move. _You just had to play the rescuer, didn't you, Tanya?_ _Now look where it's gotten you. Shirtless with your ex-boyfriend, the traitor, standing not five feet away!_

"Traveling alone?" I asked, cocking one hip suggestively. There were ways to make this into a positive situation. Or at least distract him.

His smile broadened. "Why yes, yes I am." He swung himself into one of the wooden chairs at my small table, straddling it and looking at me.

I wondered if he knew I could tell when he was lying? Probably best not to let on. I made my own smile a little bigger, and told him the truth.

"It's been lonely here. I don't like being alone." His grin widened even more.

"Well, sweetheart, I'm here now."

"Mmm-hmmm." I strolled up to him and ran one hand down his cheek. He raised his own hand to mine and brought it gently to his lips. I laughed and slipped away from him, walking toward my closet.

"Let me put something on and I can show you the city." I flipped quickly through the hangers, looking for something thick and unflattering. I was not amused by his ogling. "Where's Victoria?"

"Vicky and I had a little falling out." Humpf. I bet. I'd hated sharing, but I also felt bad for her. Not even unlovely monster girls like us should have to put up with monster douchebags like James. If Arkady had taught me nothing else, he'd at least given me that. James had enjoyed running between our beds and playing us off against each other, but Victoria had felt it more.

"I'm sorry to hear that." I said, sincerely. I was sorry, just for her. I wondered where she had gone? She could never seem to be free of him either.

I kept my back to him as I selected a shirt. I was buying time to think of a way to get rid of him . . . permanently. After his arrangement with the Volturi, how could I ever trust him again?

"Tanya," he said. "Look at me."

"What?" I said, turning.

_Thump. Thump. Thump._ The impact of the shots knocked me back into the door of my wardrobe. James smirked at me from his perch in the chair, an odd-looking gun balanced across the top of the back.

I looked down, expecting to see holes where the bullets had gone. Instead, there were three little darts embedded in my chest. The asshole had shot them at me out of his funny gun.

The nerve of this guy was just incredible. Did he not know the night I'd just had? Had he not tracked me across the city this morning? I'd had a bad day and weaponry was the last thing I wanted to deal with right now. What is it with people and shooting at me? It's as if they don't know how much it upsets me. And these darts looked just like—

Whatever James was expecting, sitting there looking down his barrel at me like a smug bastard, it wasn't what he got. The gun clattered out of his hands as I picked him up and slammed him sideways into the wall so hard it cracked the brick.

Following after him, I snatched his shoulders on the bounce back and threw him onto the floor. Leaning over, I punched him in the gut and grabbed the ponytail at the back of his head when he lurched forward, dragging his face up toward mine.

"Did Edward put you up to this?" I hissed angrily into his shocked face. "Did he put you up to this, James?"

His eyes were wide and his mouth was hanging open, but no sound was coming out. I shook him furiously.

"I asked you a question, James. Did Edward put you up to this?"

"No," he choked out. "Edward's dead."

I knew that was a lie, too. "Bullshit, James," I said, throwing him hard back onto his side. "Edward isn't dead by my hand, which means he isn't dead."

Temporarily out of my grasp, James tried to roll for the gun. Unfortunately, I'd seen that movie, too, so I grabbed his leg and yanked. He face-planted into the floor inches away from his target.

Furious at decades of his lies, his stalking, and his audacity in actually attacking me, I yanked the leg I gripped up toward my face and ripped away his khaki pants. He looked down just in time to see me sink my teeth into his Achilles tendon.

I looked right into his eyes as I drank, fighting the churning in my stomach. Who would have imagined my ex would taste so disgusting? He didn't smell that bad and usually I could eat anyone and be fine, no matter how vile their personality. It was part of what made me such a threat—nothing turned my stomach, not even my own kind. Something was seriously wrong with this vintage, although it could have been his eyes.

His brown eyes shone with pure horror as the arrogance he'd relied on all these years wilted away. I'd always been a killer to him, never a threat. I was just a woman he was with who was useful. He was a master tracker. There was nobody smarter than him, faster than him, or better than him. James was the king of his own personal universe.

My teeth in his leg must have been like the meteor hitting the dinosaurs.

To give credit where credit was due, it wasn't as though he was just lying there taking it. With his good leg he tried kicking me in the head. I saw it coming and jumped up, spattering him with his own venomy blood.

"That's not nice, James."

He pulled away and tried to stand, but with his tendon severed by my teeth he wasn't getting far. I grabbed him up and threw him back up against the wall. "How does it feel, James? You've tracked me down and now you've caught me."

I tilted his head to one side, exposing his throat. Tradition has its merits. I licked his neck and dragged the edges of my teeth along his veins. Really, he smelled good enough to eat. Always had. My stomach lurched anyway, but it wasn't the time to flinch. I'd waited for this moment for the last three years. "Whatever," I asked, continuing to threaten him with my mouth, "are you going to do now?"

"Bomb," He whispered. I could tell he was weak from his pathetic struggles to push me off. A bomb? The cowards, I thought, digging my teeth in and muttering, "Liar."

"No! It's true. We used a bomb. You can kill me, but you can't bring him back. Just like he can't fix you."

Unfortunately for us both, I was drinking instead of listening closely, thinking he was threatening me, and didn't process that last part until James was no longer capable of speech.

I spat out his vile taste and shook his body fiercely. "What do you mean, fix? I barely know Edward, why does he want to fix me? James, answer me when I'm talking to you!"

His head just lolled over, as limp as the rest of him. His raisined skin had the tell-tale grey tone that let me know I'd gone too far. Disgusted, I threw him to the floor and stalked over to the bed where I'd been packing. I ripped the frame away from the wall and knocked loose my special brick.

Then I threw up, which was both horrible and unexpected. Damn you, James, I thought, one hand holding me up against the bricks as I vomited violently into the chasm between the bed and the wall, retching long after my stomach was empty. Looking down, I could see two of the vial darts still lodged in my skin. I plucked them free with a shaking hand.

What was in these?

Sitting back onto the bed, I removed my box from the hollow in the wall. Compared to the darts I'd kept from Edward's jacket, these were longer and seemed to have a different formula. Edward's were green, like his eyes, and these were a dull brown.

And mostly empty.

Shit. What was in these?

* * *

**AN: Reviews get teasers, and I hope you're all just dying to find out how Edward & Co react to this! I'd also love to hear your questions about what's going on, and what you'd like to know most in the chapters ahead.**


	5. Chapter 4: Stragglers in the Crowd

**Disclaimer: SMeyers owns the originals. Many thanks to Project Team Beta for helping with my copies!**

**Also, apologies: Fan Fiction and I had a little disagreement over how many times this chappie was posting.  
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**~: Chapter 4: Stragglers In The Crowd :~  
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**_Chicago, APOV, June 20__th_**

Shit. What was in these?

Edward's head was lolling dangerously as he carefully steered the glass toward his mouth. Melting bits of tequila and rum slopped over the sides of the glass onto his hand as it shook. His eyes got wide and he dove straight for it. "Mustn't waste the precious," he volunteered, slurping at his messy fingers and dumping half his drink onto the table.

We were going to kill him.

"More?" asked Jasper, pitcher in hand. The margarita slush clumped enticingly against the plastic walls.

Edward giggled. Oh Christ, he actually giggled as he waved his glass up at Jasper. It was confirmed. These were going to kill him, and it was going to be entirely my fault.

But how does a girl say no to a chance like this?

I'd bounced Edward out of bed this morning wearing my biggest smile and the most hideous Hawaiian shirt I could find.

"Rise and shine, birthday boy! It's 5 o 'clock somewhere and you need to take a break. No lab today and no arguments. Drink this," I'd insisted, pressing something ridiculously purple into his hands.

"What is it?" Edward asked, casting a sleepy, baleful eye at the glass. One of the orange slices fell off the side and onto his bed. He regarded it with a wary glance as if it was an invasion of the Huns. Hell, he regarded me like I was an invasion of the Huns. The clock flickered and updated the time to read 6:17 a.m., and Edward raised one eyebrow at me.

"No arguments. That's your invitation to your party. Drink up."

Warning sign number one should have been the way Edward just sighed and obediently slurped it down.

Edward needed these drinks. It had been a long three years, especially the last six months. Being human just made things worse for him emotionally, as his dreams were horrible. There was just one advantage to being human that all of us could agree on unanimously.

Humans could get drunk.

At the moment, Edward was very, very drunk.

Warning sign number two should have been his unhesitant abandonment of his rundown wardrobe for the Hawaiian shirt I'd handed him. Stolen from Carlisle's closet, it appeared to have come from Tommy Bahama's LSD collection. I hadn't questioned its presence—Esme had put a lot of color back into Carlisle's life lately—and I was sure Carlisle wasn't going to mind seeing Edward in something other than a tattered button down and jeans.

Carlisle was going to mind if Edward was passed out by the time he arrived later this evening with Esme. There was no excuse for his current state. His bedside cocktail had loosened him up enough to actually eat breakfast instead of just picking despondently at his food, and I thought we'd been pacing him pretty well so far.

He'd only had . . . umm . . . hmmm. We'd moved from purple drinks (Tropical Depressions) to pink drinks (Sex on the Beach) to orange drinks (Tequila Sunrise) to red drinks (Margarita Surprise, and Jasper wouldn't share the surprise). How many was that? And what was that counting the beer he'd had with pizza at lunch and the car bombs he'd followed it with at the Irish place we'd gone?

I eyed Jasper suspiciously as he filled Edward's glass again. "How many?"

"Well, the pitcher holds about 4 drinks, but he spilled some, so . . . three." Jasper grinned like a Cheshire cat at my scowl.

"No, how many has he had altogether?"

Edward chimed in incoherently through a mouthful of Margarita Surprise.

Jasper looked at me. "What was that he just mumbled at me?"

"I think he's trying to tell us how many he's had." I glared at him and reached for the pitcher. "What's in this? Give it to me."

"Oh no you don't. This is Edward's surprise." He held the pitcher back and up out of my reach. I jumped for it and missed while Edward watched in amusement. He was giggling again and I tried to be mad about that, but any kind of laughter from him was such a rare sound you couldn't be mad about it.

The jarring tones of the _Theme From Jaws, _on the other hand, you could be mad about.

"Jasper! Why didn't you turn that off?"

"Emergency contact," he said, smoothly evading my pitcher grasping attempts while sliding his phone out of his pocket. His eyes widened at the name on the caller ID. The _Theme From Jaws_ was something he used for anyone he didn't trust, and he turned the phone away from me so I couldn't see who it was. "Keep him entertained," he directed, and left the room.

All Edward noticed was the departure of his alcohol source. "Alice," he said seriously, focusing on proper enunciation and waggling his glass at me, "I'm empty over here."

"Well, I'm not a barmaid, so you'll just have to help me mix up the next batch."

"I can't cook."

"Making drinks is not the same as cooking. Get over here and I'll teach you how to use the blender." There would be plenty of time later for me to reconsider the wisdom of this, but for the moment, getting Drunkbert Plasteredson from the table to the counter was an adventure in and of itself.

"Edward," I laughed, watching him stagger upright and do a zombie-sumo wrestler style stomp over to me, "we are totally cutting you off."

"No!" He shrieked and lunged for the unopened bottle of Patron sitting next to the blender.

"Yes!" Jasper tossed in his opinion decisively as he came back into the room. "You are doing one more shot with me and then you are through!"

"No!"

"Yes!" In a flash, Jasper had popped open the Patron and poured two shots. He handed one to Edward and raised his own glass high. "Happy Birthday!"

"Hashpy Berfday!" Edward replied, but before the glass even hit his lips, he went crashing to the floor. I almost went down, too, just from the reflected force of Jasper's sudden manipulation of Edward's senses.

"What are you doing?!" I yelled. "You can't just walk in here and vamp up to suggest to Edward that he's tired and needs to pass out like that. Vampire power abuse! Party foul!"

"Stuff it, Alice," Jasper said coolly as he lifted the now-unconscious Edward up off the floor. "We have an emergency situation here, and Drunkward wasn't going to be able to handle it."

I had shifted into combat mode while he spoke. "Spill. Now."

"You will stay here with him and I will keep you updated."

"Where are you going?" Jasper started to hand Edward to me before realizing that wasn't going to work. He dumped him unceremoniously back in one of the kitchen chairs and started for the door. "Hey!" I yelled, running after him. "Where are you going?"

"Russia," he said, crossing the threshold. "Bella's been spotted."

I stopped dead in my tracks. Birthday fun was officially over.

Returning to the kitchen, I surveyed the scene and checked to make sure Edward was still breathing. Jasper was usually a little more subtle with his powers of emotional suggestions. I hadn't realized "You're too drunk to stay conscious" was an emotion, but Eddie boy had gone down like a rock.

It was just as well. Any mention of Bella in his current state would have triggered an emergency situation right here in the kitchen, which already looked like a disaster area. Margarita slush was everywhere, and the stench of tequila rose above everything from where Edward's shot had gone down with him.

With a sigh, I started scrubbing. Some birthday celebration this had turned out to be. The sun was still up, but our hero was down for the count.

******~:~:~:~:~:~**

Once the kitchen was clean I went in search of my phone to start pestering Jasper for updates. I was in a foul mood from my scrub-a-thon, and he was going to need to cough up some serious details to justify the snoring, drooling, stinking lump of brother currently hanging off the couch.

_How's the flight?_

_--Uneventful. Called ahead for the jet to save time. _

_What's the rush?_ As if I didn't know. Find Bella, fix Bella, eliminate Depression's Spokeswhore from existence so we could all live happily ever after.

_--Laurent wants to skip town._

_What does he have to do with this?_

_--He called it in._

_Called what in? Bella spotting? To your phone? How?_

_--One at a time, babe._

_Stuff it. Plasteredson is a dead weight drooling on the couch and you've got a 12-hour flight ahead of you. Mansplain._

_--LOL._

_No, seriously, spill. NOW._

Radio silence—the texting equivalent of hanging up on me. That bastard.

"Now I know why you throw things," I said to Sleeping Beauty. "I'm going to throw Jasper off a cliff." Ed didn't even twitch.

I waited a little longer, but nothing. Reluctantly, I hoisted Edward up off the couch to put him to bed upstairs. He was nearly a foot taller than I was, and it seemed as though arms and legs were dangling everywhere. His gaunt form wasn't heavy—Edward had always been lean—but it was a challenge to keep him from banging into anything as we headed upstairs.

Negotiating my way up the stairs, my phone startled me when it started vibrating. I threw Edward over my shoulders like a sack of potatoes, whacking his arm soundly into the ceiling. Oops.

_--Sorry about that. Had to make some phone calls and watch some things. Carlisle's been briefed._

Great. Leave me in the dark. _Spill it,_ I texted, shifting Edward's legs to type the message. He replied with a series of links to YouTube clips for some kind of news show. _WTF, Jasper? Do you not know how hard it is to watch videos with one hand and not brain your brother's head against the wall as you drag him upstairs with the other? _

_--Did you see who's in the vids?_

_What do you mean, who? It's the stinking news in Russian. Like I understand Russian._

_--Just watch carefully._

I propped Edward against the banister at the top of the stairs and watched again. Nothing. Just some reporter woman rambling in front of an apartment building before a small explosion and—

Oh, shit.

Edward had slumped down to the floor, but I was no longer paying attention as I watched Bella in the back of the crowd. In the next link she was gone, and then there was the explosion. Another link showed a different scene, with a sketch of a black-eyed angel with Bella's features.

_Where did you find these?_

_--Victoria is sending them._

_Does she have the translation?_

_--Working on it as they come in. How's the King of Beers?_

I looked down. _Lying like a limp noodle on the floor. Way to go us. Whose idea was it to get him drunk in the first place?_

_--Yours, Alice. All yours._

_Way to win friends, Jasper._

_--He'll thank us later. Oh, and the surprise in the margarita was no booze. He'll be fine._

There was a slight moan at my feet, and I felt Edwards stomach muscles clench up. _Gotta run—think we're on the verge of a messy human moment. Keep me posted.  
_

******~:~:~:~:~:~**

By the time Carlisle arrived with Esme, I had eased Edward into his own bed after a session in the bathroom. There were upsides to being a vampire—you never saw pure vamps praying to the porcelain gods.

"How's he doing?" asked Esme, ever thoughtful. "Does he know?"

"I haven't told him," I said. "I wanted to wait until he sobered up so he didn't do anything he'd regret later, or that would get him killed."

"Good plan," said Carlisle, coming in and setting a birthday cake down on the freshly scrubbed kitchen table. I didn't have the heart to tell him Edward would never be able to keep it down. "What are our other plans?"

"They still need to be made. Obviously, a lot depends on what Jasper learns once he hits the ground in St. Petersburg and meets with Laurent." I frowned. "There's something weird with that whole situation over and above the usual mess."

"Yes," Carlisle agreed. "It's shedding some light on other inconsistencies with the Volturi's handling of the affair over the last few years, too."

"But what have we proven, other than that they are unpredictable, violent, and power-hungry? We knew that already." Esme's opinion was softly spoken. "We must always remember to focus on what is real and what is fact, instead of theories."

Carlisle nodded. Esme had survived for centuries as an independent operator in Italy, a traditional Volturi stronghold. Though she never looked it, she was fierce and tough. Esme's caring demeanor, polished beauty, and motherly exterior caused people to underestimate both her intelligence and her fighting abilities. Unable to defeat her in battle or with tactics, the Volturi had decided they had other things to do. I was glad she was on our team now.

"So," I said brightly. "What do we do now?"

"Let's eat," said Esme, matter-of-factly. "We should also choose our weapons now—there may not be time later."

******~:~:~:~:~:~**

Much later, I shook Edward awake. Well, I tried.

"Go away." His voice was muffled as he pressed his face down into the pillow. "And turn off that fucking light when you go."

"Get up, Edward. I have coffee and aspirin."

The disembodied pillow voice was emphatic. "..Stop." With his free hand he flipped me the bird.

"Edward!" I stamped my foot and yanked back the covers. "Bella made the news in St. Petersburg."

THAT got him up. He powered himself out of bed and downstairs to the den so fast I had to chase him with his coffee. Glued to the TV and flicking through the channels, his flannel pants and housecoat were still waving when I made my second attempt.

"Coffee, Edward. Aspirin."

He grabbed the pills and threw them to the back of his throat before snatching the coffee out of my hands and taking a long pull. "What channel?"

I guided him toward the laptop open on the coffee table and clicked the keys to feed the collected news footage over the plasma big screen. He flinched when he saw the stretchers parading across the screen.

"What are they saying? What?!"

"Apparently there are 11 bodies. Absolutely torn to shreds. The killing must have happened in the night, because it was discovered as a fresh disaster in the morning. Well, their morning. The apartment below was empty, and when the landlord came to show the place there was blood dripping from bullet holes in the ceiling."

Edward groaned. "Bella did this? How do you know?"

"She's standing there."

"What?!" His bleary eyes hadn't spotted her in the crowd. Anticipating this, I had a file of screen shots with her face circled. Clicking through the images, Edward frowned and made the same deduction we all had hours earlier: "She caused that explosion, didn't she?"

"Yes." Edward turned at the sound of Carlisle's voice and gave a nod to him and Esme as they joined us from the kitchen, bringing the coffee pot with them. Esme also had a tray of deli meats and crackers. Adrenaline was only going to keep Edward going for so long, and I knew his stomach was currently empty.

He turned back to the screen, clicking back and forth between the various images. "What was her motivation?"

"We think she spotted Laurent," said Esme, advancing the screen to a different set of pictures showcasing him. "He was following her, and she needed to shake him off."

Edward had scowled at the mention of Laurent's name and was still glaring actively at the screen. "Did it work?" he asked testily. He wanted to be the one to bring her in, not some Volturi flunky.

I gave a grim chuckle. "He was shaken before. Now he's actively shaking, thinking that he's on her hit list."

"How do you know?" Edward asked, looking up at me from the seat he'd taken on the couch. He was signaling Carlisle to top up his cup as he stuffed stacked crackers in his mouth, so Carlisle continued the story for us while he poured.

"Jasper will be on the ground in a matter of hours, and Laurent has agreed to meet with him. Laurent had called Victoria, who, as you know, is trying to find a new home for herself with us, and she phoned Jasper with the news late last night." By tacit agreement, we weren't mentioning Jasper's little power display knocking Edward out.

"I don't trust her." Edward's statement was flat and non-negotiable. "She's compromised."

"That may be changing," Esme said. "We are awaiting confirmation of James' death at Bella's hand."

Edward just looked at her. I'd once heard him vow to rip James to shreds with his bare hands, and from my own past, I could understand the need to personally erase a threat from the scene. However, given that Bella and James had been dating off and on for decades, this was a shocking development.

Carlisle sat down next to Edward on the couch, shaking him out of his blank stare. "There's more, whenever you're ready."

Edward shook his head to clear it. "Continue."

Carlisle topped up the cup again. Was that three already? We were going to have to work on Edward's drinking issues one of these days.

"James was not with Bella, nor was he hunting her. He was in the city for another purpose when their paths crossed. Laurent has not said why—he told Victoria only that it was an accident, a complete accident."

"How did he track her?" Edward's question was curious, as Bella was not exactly easy to find.

Esme cued up another YouTube clip. This one was a special interest piece on the local news and featured the sketch of Bella as an angel. Take away the wings, flaming sword, and blood dripping from her teeth and it wasn't a bad likeness. Okay, leave the blood on her teeth—that was probably pretty accurate.

"First on camera, now this?" Edward was shocked. "Bella's getting careless."

Esme shook her head. "Something else is going on. This is just one layer."

"Explain."

Esme went back to the screen shots and started with the sketch. "This is from early in the evening. A woman went to a church to pray for help, and Bella was there, black-eyed and fierce. Hence the avenging angel bit—this woman thinks Bella was an angel sent by God to answer her prayers."

"And people believe this?" he asked, one eyebrow raised.

"They wouldn't, but she has the children. Three little girls, kidnapped and believed dead, suddenly alive and delivered by our alleged angel to this St. Petersburg granny. The woman will not shut up, but the children won't talk about it. They say thank you to her but won't say more—the oldest said they promised to keep it a secret."

"But?" Edward asked. There was always a 'but' in these situations, especially once the media got involved.

Esme advanced to the apartment building. "The woman lived in this building, and it's not a large leap for anyone to connect the dots. The dead men who have been identified are known thugs, and there is evidence mounting that they may have been planning to sell the girls into the sex trade."

Edward nodded grimly. "So no mourners there."

"No," said Esme, advancing several screens. "James was able to track Bella from here to another location we don't have yet, and then Laurent was able to follow her back here. But look at Bella here. What's different?"

Edward looked at Bella for a long time. Watching him watch her was interesting. He was hungover and processing a lot of new information, but a piece of him also looked happy. Bella was found! Bella just looked pissed. She hated attention—even as a human she'd preferred to stay in the shadows, a tendency her vamp self had taken to a whole other level. If she knew she'd been caught on camera she'd be kicking herself.

Edward seemed to kick himself, too, back into reality from dreamland. "Obviously no wings or sword. But that's not what's important here, right? What am I missing?"

Carlisle set a small picture down on the table. Bella at the lakeshore, taken from our wall. "Look closer," he suggested.

Edward stared at the photo of Bella, and then at the grainy enlargement from the news footage. When his coffee mug hit the floor, I knew he'd seen it.

"How?" he gasped, voice raspy with caffeine and shock. "How is that possible?"

Bella's eyes were a warm, human brown. In both pictures.

No contact lenses could ever completely hide the electric red irises of a freshly fed vampire, and the stretcher parade was a sure sign that Bella had been exercising her vampiric abilities with gusto, so she could hardly be hungry. Her eyes were known to clear their red quickly but even for her this was wrong. Esme had caught the discrepancy, and Carlisle had several theories.

"Exactly how?" I said, tossing a towel at Edward so he could mop the coffee off his feet. "No one knows. Jasper is hoping that Laurent will be able to shed some light on the situation."

Edward patted the floor on autopilot, eyes glued back on the screen. Finally, he tore his gaze away and stared at Carlisle. "How much longer?" he asked, gesturing at himself.

"It's the new batch. When was your last dose? It could be another three or four months."

He groaned in frustration and buried his head in his hands. "I can't let her get away again," he said. "Not like this." He fisted his hair in his hands and let out a sigh of exasperation. There was nothing for that, so we sat for a moment in silence, until a small chime made everyone look at me. I looked down at my phone.

"Jasper's landed. He's leaving the airport to meet Laurent."

Edward nodded, then posed one more question. "What now?"

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**What now, indeed? Chapter 5 is written and off with the beta team. Bella is crouching on a rooftop, hanging onto a chimney stack. What's behind her . . . and what's ahead? Stay tuned!**


	6. Chapter 5: Beds in Strange Corners

**AN: Apologies to SMeyer, thanks to Project Team Beta, and love to my readers.**

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**~: Chapter 5: Beds in Strange Corners :~**

_St. Petersburg, BPOV_

What now?

There was no doubt that I was not well. I'd been sick all morning, dry heaving and twitching. My body was barely under my control now as I stumbled across the rooftops, frantically making my escape.

Laurent had seen me. Had he seen me see him? I glanced back over my shoulder again, checking for signs of pursuit.

Nothing.

If he was after me, and really watching, he would know that in my present state he could take me. Bigger than me, stronger than me, and with James's death to avenge, he could take me down and earn himself a permanent place of honor with the Volturi with my head.

We'd been friends once. Funny how that works.

I paused against a chimneystack and dry heaved again. I was panting heavily from all the running and jumping, which was not a good sign.

I wasn't even supposed to be breathing. _Stop that_, I ordered my body. It didn't listen. I focused on holding my breath and found myself swaying. My head spun and I gave in, gasping like a drowning rat up on the rooftop, sucking in oxygen like I actually needed it.

Maybe I did, now. _Fuck you, James. _I should have killed him twice, just for good measure. I'd been kicking his corpse all day as I'd talked with the hospital about what to do with Arkady's body and attempted to clean up the place. It was probably rude to abuse the dead, but I was past caring. Where did he get off, shooting me full of God knows what? I should have ripped him into shreds before I burned him.

Rage made my vision swim and I hugged the chimneystack tighter. _Get a hold of yourself_, I thought. _So you've been shot. You've been shot before. What's a few darts instead of bullets?_ My body responded with another bout of the heaves. _Okay_, I thought, _maybe I need to lie down for a while and recover instead of running around on rooftops in the warm evening sun._

Just as soon as I figured out where to go to ground. Letting go of the chimneystack, I started unsteadily for the next house. Counting detours to make sure there was no Laurent behind me, I was what . . . three miles from a safe place? Four?

Unless Laurent was waiting for me up ahead. The thought brought me up short, which was a bad thing, because I'd already jumped for the next rooftop.

_Oh, this just makes my day, _I thought_. _I grabbed for the ledge and missed, stripped a power cord, thumped a balcony, and landed stonily on my feet.

Right in front of a ghost.

"Holy shit!" he yelped, stepping back.

"Ben Cheney." I replied, straightening up. Or trying to. My head spun, my vision swam, and the sidewalk zoomed up to meet me.

Ben leaned over and asked me the dumbest thing I'd heard all day.

"Are you okay?"

"Not okay," I choked out, my body starting to spasm. Understatement of my life, actually. I couldn't make my muscles stop twitching and I felt like I was on fire. It was a horrible but oddly familiar sensation. But when had I ever been burned alive before?

Ben offered me a hand up, eyes wide. "Where did you come from?"

"Ben," I rasped, grabbing his outstretched arm and hauling myself off the pavement. Was that his arm? It was so much bigger than I remembered. "We'll get to that later." I swallowed back another set of dry heaves, and knocked my pride down with it. "Ben, I need help."

He nodded and grabbed me as I stumbled, sweeping me off my feet and up into his arms. He was a lot bigger than I remembered. Much more muscular.

When did Ben get muscles? "Get Rose and tell her I'm sick." He swung me over toward the curb and hailed a passing taxi instead, dropping my legs suddenly to wave down the driver. My stomach heaved again at the equilibrium shift and things went black for a minute. I struggled to keep my eyes open, but it was getting dark.

No, it was just Ben. His shape combined with the tinted windows on the cab were blocking out the sun. Why was he here? He came from the woods. He was a little boy in the woods. Just a little boy. In the woods. In the snow. So small. So cold. In the woods.

Why were the woods on fire?

******~:****~:****~:****~:****~:****~:********~:~**

_Room 418, Later_

"Dad, I swear to God she's asleep. And she's definitely breathing."

"That's impossible."

"Whatever. Impossible fell out of the sky today, okay? Impossible called me by name, asked me for help, and then blacked out in the back of a taxi. Don't lecture me about impossible, okay? I'm getting enough grief from my own two eyes, okay?"

"You need to calm down."

"Calm this, okay?" He hung up.

******~:****~:****~:****~:****~:****~:********~:~**  


_Room 418, Later_

"What do you mean, probably safe?"

"I said, you're probably safe. If she was going to eat you, she would have done it by now."

"Well, if she was going to wake up she would have done it by now, too. What's going on? And when were you planning to tell me all this shit Gramps has been spouting about our family and vampires was really true, anyway?"

"We've made contact with Rose, and Emmett's on his way. Just sit tight."

"Sit tight? Sit tight? I've skipped my workout and cancelled on the fight tomorrow and my manager thinks I'm insane. Maybe I am insane. Cause you know what? I'm supposed to be sitting tight next to the stuff of legends, who may or may not kill me when she wakes up because she's hungry."

"She's never harmed us."

"You. She's never harmed you. Do you know the stuff she says in her sleep? What does she even weigh, a hundred pounds soaking wet? If even half of this stuff is true I'll be in therapy for the rest of my life."

"She saved your grandfather, Ben. He says to treat her like an angel."

"An angel, Dad. Really? Get him on the line to verify that, because she's talking about killing people and eating them, Dad."

His grandfather's voice rasped on the line. "Some angels have teeth, Benny boy. Are you feeding her meat?"

"Am I what?"

"Meat," said his grandfather, enunciating the "t" harshly. "Get her some raw deer." He said this in the same way someone might say, "Offer her a soda, will you?"

"Raw. Deer. Right. Let me just order that from room service and we'll be peachy keen."

His father had put the phone on speaker. "Be respectful of your grandfather, Ben. He's trying to give you advice."

"Advice, right. Advice. Somehow, finding raw meat to stuff down her unconscious throat doesn't sound like advice, Dad. It sounds like the stuff they make horror movies out of."

"Would you calm down?"

"Calm this, okay?" He hung up. He got up. He paced the room, pausing to look down at Tanya tossing and turning on the bed, muttering all the while. Behind her closed lids, her eyes were going wild. Probably catching up on a lifetime of REM sleep, since vampires don't sleep.

Or breathe, which she was doing at a rapid, rasping pace. Like she was running a marathon in her sleep. Which might explain the sweating, which vampires don't do, either. Her hair was sticking to her face and beads of sweat rolled across her forehead.

His grandfather had said that was impossible, too. It was getting harder and harder to believe the man had actually been raised by vampires. Which had always been a weird story, but whatever. Some people's grandparents get kidnapped by aliens, his got raised by vampires, or something like that. That was Gramps; he was a little weird.

The weird was getting a little less weird, if half of what he said was true. Ben was wishing he'd listened a little better to his grandfather's stories after he had his stroke. Some part of all that rambling had to be true, otherwise there was no explanation for Rose and Emmett. They had worked with his dad managing the orphanages, and had worked with his grandfather, too, back in the day. He'd seen pictures of them all over his grandparents' house since he was little. He had simply accepted them as existing, distant relatives or whatever, along with the mysterious Tanya, much-revered aunt of Ben Cheney.

Ben Cheney the first, that is. Ben Cheney the Third wasn't so sure what to think about her. He knew her from pictures, of course, just like they all did. Stuff of legends she was, rescuing his poor lost orphan grandfather from freezing to death in the Canadian woods and leading him away to be brought up by Rose and Emmett. Where were they living now, anyway? He couldn't remember. Not close enough to St. Petersburg, that was for damn sure.

Tanya shifted and muttered something incoherent. Ben gave her a wary eye. Stuff of legends was both more and less impressive when it was passed out in his bed.

******~:****~:****~:****~:****~:****~:********~:~**  


_Room 418, Later_

There was a knock at the door. He peeped through the eyehole and swore. His manager knocked again. "I know you're in there. Open up."

Ben sighed and opened the door. If Tanya was going to wake up and eat somebody, he knew just where she should start.

His manager came into the room and stopped short. "Family emergency? You cancelled on the biggest exhibition fight of the year because of a family emergency, and now you've got some Russian whore sleeping it off in here?"

Ben decided hitting him would be a bad idea, and that lying was only sort of going to work. Better stick to the truth. Edited. Really, really edited.

"This is my family emergency." He gestured at the bed as Tanya flung herself over toward the wall. He supposed that with her long dark hair, sweaty pale skin, and tight leather clothes she did look kind of like a drunk whore. _Ick. How can you think of a family legend like that?_

"What, is she pregnant? I can get you something for that." Jesus H., his manager was a bastard.

"She's not pregnant. She's not a whore. She's my . . .aunt."

"Your aunt, my ass."

"Well, she's my father's aunt, actually." _Grandfather's, technically. Best to leave that part out. _ "And she's not feeling well."

"I can see that. What the hell is wrong with her?"

"We're figuring that out. My Uncle Emmett is coming over to get her, okay?"

"Since when do you have an Uncle Emmett? I thought I'd met your whole family." He frowned at Tanya's heavy, gasping breaths. "Shouldn't you take her to the hospital or something?"

"She's not that kind of sick." _Leave_, he thought. _Please just leave._

"I thought you said you didn't know what was wrong with her."

"Look, did you come here to ask me something or to gape at my aunt?"

"Your father's aunt."

"Whatever."

"She looks like she's eighteen. Where do you even find these girls, Ben?"

"She's not eighteen. She's in her twenties." _And has been for a while_, _apparently_, _but we're not getting into that._ "For the last time, she's not a whore, and thank you for your high opinion of me."

They glared at each other. _Go away_, Ben thought. His manager asked, "What's her name?"

"That's not important," he said. "Don't you have something else to do?"

"What is going on that you are trying to get rid of me so hard, Ben? We're supposed to be a team here. Friends. And now you're acting like a stranger."

"As one friend to another, then, I'll spell it out. Make yourself a stranger."

His manager stormed to the door and yanked it open. "We flew all the way over here for this fight! What the hell happened?"

Ben shoved him out. "I told you, man. Family emergency."

He locked the door, threw the bolt, and looked over at his "aunt" Tanya. His career in mixed martial arts was just getting started, and cancelling out now was a cheap shot to the nuts for his manager. Yet for all his muscles and menace, he was a softie on the inside. Vampire or not, this was a woman in trouble.

He clicked on the news to relax and then wished he hadn't. _Hello again, auntie._

******~:****~:****~:****~:****~:****~:********~:~**  


_Room 418, Later_

"Dad, I'm going to try to wake her up, because we may have to move, but I'm going to leave the line open so you can record my last words for posterity."

"For the 400th time, Ben, she's not going to eat you. She doesn't eat people." _Yeah fucking right,_ he thought. _Try watching the news sometime, Pops. _He didn't have the heart to tell his dad about that, but he suspected that Gramps wouldn't be too surprised. The old man was just full of unsurprised today, and just about everything that came out of his mouth was disturbing. _And I used to think my family was boring_.

"Gramps, is she going to eat me?"

"I don't think she does that anymore. You should be fine."

_Should_. _You had to love the should_. _Is this honestly my life now?_ "Okay, I'm putting the phone down now." He set it on the bedside table and knelt gingerly on the floor. _You can do this_, he said to himself. _Man up._

He touched her on the shoulder and gave her a gentle shake. "Tanya? It's time to wake up."

She stirred. "Ben?"

"Yes."

"How did we get out of the woods? They were on fire."

_What the?_ "Tanya, there aren't any woods here."

"I'm sorry." She whispered the words and he leaned in closer to hear her. "So sorry."

"Tanya?"

"For the nightmares, Ben. I didn't mean to give you nightmares. Now I make them plug their ears. No more nightmares."

"Right." Ben made a mental note to not ask his grandfather about that. He didn't want to know. "It's okay, Tanya. You were just talking in your sleep."

"Sleep?" She sat up sharply, eyes wild and vacant. "No. I don't sleep. People sleep. Dream. Have nightmares. Like you. All those nightmares. But your father was a bad man, Ben. I had to do it. I couldn't let him hurt you again."

"What?" His father spoke at the same time he did, and in the background he heard his grandfather mutter, "Don't ask." Tanya didn't appear to hear.

"We're good to you, aren't we? You don't have to be afraid with us." She was getting more agitated and Ben rocked back on his heels, away from her personal space. No accidental bitings happening here, thank you very much. "Rose loves you so much, and Emmett, and I do too, just like you had always been our family. Our people. You and your family will be our people, Ben. Forever. Don't be scared. We'll always protect you. Always."

There was absolute silence in the room while she stared at him, panting. "Always." Her eyes weren't entirely in focus, but she was clearly waiting for some kind of response.

Ben gulped and nodded. "Always." She nodded back and then thumped back down onto the pillows. Within seconds, she was passed again. Still a little shocked, Ben could hear his name coming through the open phone.

"Ben. Ben! Are you still there?"

He picked up the phone. "Yeah, Dad. I'm here. Just a little stunned. Gramps, you want to do some filling in? Start with the part where she did something to your father and now we're a pack of Renfields owned by vampires."

"I think she thinks I'm you." He sounded nostalgic and more than a little touched.

"I've gathered that. Now explain the rest."

His grandfather sighed. "It's a messy story and it isn't important. Keep her safe, Ben."

"Isn't she supposed to be keeping us safe? Because she said—"

"Don't get mouthy with me, young man." His voice was suddenly sharp. "She's our people the same as we're hers. It's called a family, Ben, and you'd do well to remember it. When was the last time you talked to your grandmother? She's getting old and won't be around much longer."

"Don't change the subject on me, old man. You're going to live to be a thousand. Now spill."

"I owe her my life. This family owes her its existence. You take care of her or so help me, I'll kill you myself."

"Jesus, Gramps. I'm looking after her, aren't I? Calm down."

"Calm this, okay?" spat his grandfather, and hung up on him. Old dog, new tricks.

Chuckling, Ben set the phone down and looked over at Tanya. She had one arm thrown up over her eyes and the covers were off the bed again. She'd clawed through part of her shirt, and the three red welts on her chest were puffy and oozing slightly. They emitted a muddy brown sludge that had to be bothering her because she'd clawed at the marks for a long time. Even now, nearly 24 hours after he'd brought her here, her free hand would swipe at the wounds from time to time, usually accompanied by muttering. Somebody named James was dead meat when she got home.

Wherever that was. Ben sighed. Despite a starring role in his family's history, no one really knew much about her present life. Gramps had shown him pictures of her for years as part of story-time over the holidays. "This is my Aunt Tanya, and when she shows up, you be good to her." It was like a ritual with him that he used to think was just a harmless bit of Gramps crazy. Not so crazy now, though. More like a preparatory warning: "And when you spot this little serial killer, you be real well behaved, you hear me, boy?"

Good thing his manager didn't watch the news. He'd had it on for a minute, seen a sketch of her, and struggled to make sense of the broadcast. Little kids with blood on them, stretchers, some crazy old lady, explosions . . . Aunt Tanya had been busy lately.

She rolled over and muttered again. Edward something. Something about Rose. She was speaking in all kinds of languages and he could only pick out names here and there.

And then she said the phrase that really scared him. "Hungry," she muttered, "so hungry."

Emmett had better get here soon.

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**I hate to leave Ben hanging like that, biting his nails (in a manly way, of course) while freaking out about exactly what you feed your vampire auntie when she wakes up . . . but you know, across town Laurent is awfully late for his appointment with Jasper. What's the hold up? I love to hear your guesses, questions, and speculations!**


	7. Chapter 6: Pickings from the Pockets

**AN: With love to all my readers, this chapter is twice as long as usual. Many thanks to Project Team Beta, and apologies to SMeyer.  
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**~: Chapter 6: Pickings from the Pockets :~  
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_St. Petersburg, Jasper's POV_

_Laurent had better get here soon._ The café was slow this afternoon, and the waitress was giving me the evil eye as I lingered over my coffee, no doubt hoping I would cash out soon so she could go do whatever it was waitresses did on a dead day. Sadly, I had to stay. _Laurent, you late bastard, hurry the fuck up._

The birds had taken care of the roll, saving me from going through the pretense of eating it. I hadn't meant to order it, but with my Russian skills even being at the right café was a gift from God. I wasn't about to bitch over a few unwanted pastries.

Shifting in my seat, I started in with the affirmations. _You are patient_, I told myself. _You are calm_. So calm, in fact, that in less than .02 seconds I was going to show that waitress where she could stuff her stink eye.

_Deep breaths, Jasper. You are not here to eat the civilians_. I missed being an unregulated gangster. Respectability had its moments, but this was not one of them.

My pocket pinged softly and I whipped out my phone. _Alice_. Decompressing slightly, I ran my thumb gently over the picture of her that popped up on my phone along with her message. Respectability had its perks, and I couldn't ever regret that choice since she'd been a part of the package.

Not that she knew anything about all that, which was as it should be. She'd been through enough just getting to my side of the world in the first place.

I texted her back as a way to pass the time.

_No, he's not here yet. I'm worried that I'm being stood up._

_--Good things come to those who wait._

_Patience is not my strong suit._

_--I remember._

_As do I. Different story going on here, though._

_--What's your fallback?_

_We didn't set one. This is on his terms._

_--I don't like it._

_Did I say I did?_

_--Testy, testy._

_Bite me, Alice._

_--My pleasure . . . anywhere you like._

_I'm writing that down._

_--Please, like you're so deprived you need coupons._

"See something you like?" Laurent's soft voice wiped the smile right off my face. Startled off the sex-ting trail, I pocketed my phone and put out my hand.

"You're still a sneaky little fucker, you know that?" He just laughed at my frustration, and his grip was smooth as he pulled me up out of my chair. We man-hugged and then stepped back to scope each other out.

He looked the same as ever. Perfect dreadlocks no matter what the weather, buffed leather clothes, and a lean form projecting a soft, inviting experience the ladies couldn't stay away from. His teeth gleamed in his dark face, canines carefully shielded as he smirked at me.

"That woman makes you soft, Jasper. You should be more careful."

Right, as if soft was really what Alice made me. "I love that woman, Laurent. And you could sneak up on a ghost."

He dropped into the chair across from me and waved for a menu, much to the annoyance of the waitress. My inner asshole cheered as she stalked over in a huff, but somewhere along the way Laurent must have done something to make her think better of her attitude, because by the time she hit the table she was all smiles with fresh coffees and rolls ready to go. Real ladykiller, that Laurent.

"You're late," I said, fake sipping my coffee.

"My apologies," Laurent said insincerely. He gestured at the food and switched into our traditional French, something we'd honed during the years I never mentioned to Alice. "I know the pretense bores you but I need the appearance of normalcy."

I raised one eyebrow at him and he sighed, dropping the debonair front and looking as tired and frazzled as I'd ever seen him. "I can sneak up on a ghost, Jasper, but I could not sneak up on that woman. She knew I was behind her. It was a trap, a total trap, and I was almost toasted."

"I've seen the video, Laurent. It looked like a distraction blast, not a targeted hit. Don't panic unnecessarily."

"Unnecessarily?" He thumped a fist on the table. "I know what she is better than most. I have reason to panic. It is stupid to be here."

I fake sipped my coffee again and sent calming waves at him. We needed whatever he had to say, and that meant I had to keep him from bolting. It didn't prevent me from toying with him a little, however.

"Why are you here, if it is so stupid?"

He scooted his chair closer, leaning in and buttering a roll while he spoke to me in a lower voice. "Guilt. Past due favors. Bad karma. A desire to live freely. Take your pick." He tossed the first roll aside and started in on a second, flicking his eyes at me. "Mostly guilt. And James, as usual."

"Tell me again why you hang out with him? He's been screwing you over for years."

"He is useful, just as you are."

"Friends for 200 years, and that's how you see me? Useful?"

"You know I have no friends, only allies for a time." Which was precisely why he survived, and precisely why we weren't any closer. Laurent had loyalty only to himself, as I'd had ample occasion to witness from our mercenary days. Still, he was trustworthy up to a point. . . and on his third roll. For a cold, hard man that neither feared nor fidgeted, this was a big deal. I ignored it.

"Fine. James was the ally this time. What was the excuse that brought you here?"

"It's not important. The story starts with the one you seek."

"Every detail matters when it comes to her. You know this. Why were you here?"

He glared at me, angry. I removed my calming influence from the air and played up the underlying fear in his countenance.

"Stop with your tricks, Jasper. My nerves are bad enough." He threw down the roll he'd been buttering, disgusted. "200 years and you think I don't know when you play me?"

"I didn't hear any complaints on the calming."

He stood. I stood. Things got tense.

The waitress ran over with the bill, breaking the mood. No killing each other in front of the human . . . at least not in broad daylight. We both threw money at her and she scurried off again.

"Laurent," I said, keeping my voice even as we faced the street, "I have to know it all or they will never let it rest."

He hissed air in through his teeth and spat derisively. "I do not fear them. I fear only her."

"We can't stop her if we can't find her, and we need every piece of the puzzle to do that. Besides," I said, playing a new angle, "if you're double-crossing the Volturi I need to know. I've got some other deals going with them I'd like to not get derailed."

"This is nothing to do with them."

"Prove it."

He growled . . . and gave in. "Walk with me. I am too restless to be still."

We set a brisk pace down the street, away from the open square and its fine sight lines. Laurent was taking me into a warren of back streets that he seemed to know well, but I was S.O.L. if I wanted to ever see my hotel again without his guidance. Still, he didn't give off a threatening vibe, just the same generally pissy one he typically had with me when we were together.

A left, a right, and then a dead stop in front of a work crew repairing some downed power lines.

"Here," he said. "The trail stops here." I just looked at him.

"Whose trail?"

"Don't be stupid."

"Did you chase her here?"

"Don't be stupid, mon ami. Chase her? No. I will not chase the Distiller alone. Others may crave Death's Kiss, but I do not. Are we clear? I share the air with Death and yet I live. Why? Because I do not chase her."

I clapped my hands softly at his performance. "Well-spoken, old friend. Well-spoken. You do not chase Death." I paused, then brought my hand to my face, cupping my chin and tapping my cheek with my forefinger. "You do not chase Death, and yet you know she was here. Could it be that you are a really sneaky little ass-fucker?"

He laughed and shook his finger at me. "One day you will fall for my act, Jasper. One day."

"Never. Now spill." He nodded, amused, and started walking again, circling the workmen. We made like casual rubberneckers and scoped them out as they reattached the wires to the wall. Laurent gestured up and around.

"Okay, so I fear the Distiller but I follow her any way. We were friends once, and what is a little explosion between friends? Clearly she does not want me to follow, so obviously I must. Just with more space so she thinks I am not there. I do not think she will kill me now. It is risky, but she is sick, and I am less afraid of her when she is so."

"But?" I prompted.

"But nothing. One minute she is ahead of me. I lose her for a moment, find the scent, follow back, and arrive here, where it is too late. Poof! She has vanished. There is just a muddle of human scents going in every direction. Nothing you can follow and none of them hers. Now I worry because I do not know where she is and she is a master of being exactly where she should not be."

Several questions flooded my mind. Bella was sick? How? And how could he trail her without being seen? You couldn't follow air, and she was just that. Laurent just watched my mind spin, so I spit out the first thing that hit my tongue. "She doesn't have a smell, so how can you track the scent?"

"Ah, this is the great mystery. Her sudden smells." He wheeled away from the work crew and took off in another direction, forcing me to jog to keep up. We stopped abruptly in front of a gym a few blocks away.

"We are here for this." He gestures broadly at the gym, and the posters there. I don't follow.

"You're working out with James?"

"I forget you have no Russian." Muttering something about time wasting idiots, he walked me over to an announcement in English pegged on a side door. "We are here for the fight." He tapped the poster and smiled a smile with all of his teeth. "Actually, we are here for the fighters. James is participating and we are going to collect a few to sell to the Volturi."

"The slave trade again? Didn't you learn?"

"These are strong words, mon ami." He scowled at me, wagging a finger. "It is not like before. We are recruiting bodyguards . . . sourcing talent. Nobody is a slave. I am a free agent, representing James as a fighter. That is all. Nothing with the rest, that is James' business."

_Yeah, right._ First thing when I got back I was enrolling Alice in more mixed martial arts classes. The upskilling of the Volturi's more disposable guard dogs was not a good development.

"Okay, whatever. I'll ignore that for now. What does a fight have to do with tracking?"

He grinned. "I will get there. Let me tell it as I remember. Come." We moved over to the other side of the building, where there was a discreet side exit. "We are here, okay? Finishing after a late night session of practice and discussing. We come outside, planning to hunt a little, when suddenly, we smell her."

Again with the smells. "How do you smell her?"

He snorted. "The blood, of course. We smell her blood."

I shook my head at him. "You are so full of shit. She has no smell. Who did you really smell?"

"You are so smart, Jasper. Why bother to explain? Sniff for yourself."

I gave him an evil eye. He knew my skills were not strong in this area, but I could sense that he was confident that this would solve something for me. I focused, took a deep breath, and smelled . . . blood, actually. I smelled a lot of different kinds of human blood.

Before I knew it, I was on the roof, chasing that smell. Laurent was right beside me. "This is how it was for us. We were minding our own business, doing another thing. And then this blood."

I could only nod. Alice and I had been working on my diet for a long time, but I kept having to cheat and snitch blood samples from the clinic we used as a front for the vamp lab. Animals just couldn't cut it all the time. Even the sample blood was nothing compared to this rich, ripe aroma of recent carnage.

I pulled up at a churchyard full of crime scene tape. "The girls?"

Laurent nodded. "The girls. We wait here, because the trail stopped here for us and we wanted to know about the blood. We fight, but we are hungry. Just when we are about to go in . . . she comes out."

"So you chase her?"

"Don't be stupid."

"You said you didn't chase Death alone. You had James. It's not a stupid suggestion."

Laurent snorted. "James is a coward. When he recognized her we hid."

I snorted. "She could smell you a mile away. She's best at tracking her own."

He nodded gravely. "This is true." He looked out over the skyline for a moment, chewing over words in his mind. I could smell the blood trail continuing on, but we didn't move until he had sorted through all the possible phrases and decided on the arrangement he wanted.

Standing against the roofline, he gestured broadly out toward the city and the harbor beyond it. "In all this space, if anything were to find me, it would be the nose of the Distiller. She can smell my blood. She can smell my soul. She knows my very essence. She described it to me once."

I widened my eyes. This was news. "What did she say?"

"She says to me, it is lucky we are friends, Laurent, because you smell so mouth-watering."

"Freaky shit."

He just nodded and went back to studying the sky. "That night, when she came out of the church, it was not my death on her mind. Even James did not register on her mind, and she had much to kill him for even then. But she did nothing, did not even pause to sniff the air to see if she was followed. She did not care. She simply went home."

I frowned. "That's really not like her."

He nodded. "She sees everything . . . when she is well." We were back on the move, suddenly, as Laurent swooped to the next roof.

"What is this with the sick bit? You know we don't get sick." I called after him, running again, and wishing he wasn't so damn fast. We zoomed over rooftops, past windows, and I was eternally thankful for the human tendency to never, ever, look up.

Over the blood trail I could smell both Laurent and James now, making the path clear. A child could have tracked this. I slowed up, as there was no way I was losing my way now. Laurent waited ahead of me on the edge of a dingy apartment block, pointing down a cobbled alleyway to a blackened window with more crime scene tape.

"She goes in. I stop here. Something is wrong, obviously, and I don't want any part of it. Life is short, you know?"

"Laurent, we're practically immortal."

"Practically. Not actually. And life is short . . . for the stupid."

Okay, so he had a point there. I nodded my acknowledgement. "James was stupid?"

"James was stupid."

Looking at the blackened window, I thought that was a neat summation of what had probably been a really messy end. She'd obviously burned the place to cover her tracks, although the fire pattern seemed to indicate that things had gotten a little out of control.

"Did you watch that? What happened?"

Laurent scrubbed his face with his hands and sat down heavily on the roof's edge, propping his feet against the gutter. He went back to studying the sky, leaning his head back against the slope of the roof. I debated sitting, too, but in the end opted to stand. It gave me a better view of his face, which was running through more emotions than I'd ever seen on anyone not in the throes of PMS.

With an explosive sigh, he started talking again. "It was so many years ago that we met, you know? How could I know what would happen now? I didn't know what he would become."

"And what did he become?" I said, thinking, _he was always a bastard in my book._

"A cheater and a traitor."

I waited for Laurent to elaborate on that, but he rocked up on his feet, jumping into a tense pacing pattern. Backing away seemed like a good plan. He was wound up tight with something and getting jumpier by the minute.

"Laurent, I'm gonna vibe you with some calm, okay? You're making me nervous."

He stopped for a moment, then shook his head. "I am making myself nervous with my guilt." His eyes scanned the horizons warily and then circled back to me. "The guilt is very bad here."

Again with the guilt . . . "Laurent, man, what did you do?"

"I introduced them." He looked so mournful I had to laugh, which pissed him off royally. "Mon ami, you do not understand how it was with them that day, and you do not know . . . "

"Laurent, Edward was thrilled when you re-introduced her to him."

He winced. "Not that introduction. I have regret for that. I should not have been involved. This guilt is for introducing James to the Distiller."

"Because you got him killed?"

"No, because they were not good for each other."

I just looked at him like he'd grown three heads. Was Laurent for fucking real? "Let me get this straight," I asked him. "You're feeling all guilty and worked up not because your partner in crime has been murdered, but because you're a bad matchmaker?"

"I am not a matchmaker!" he huffed, stomping into the roofline like a four year old.

"Obviously, since she killed him."

"Well, he shot her."

_And we all know how she feels about that. _"With what?"

He didn't answer. Instead, he jumped off the building. I huffed on after him down the fire escape and met him pacing back and forth again. "Smell," he commanded.

I smelled. Less blood, lots of soap, ash, and . . . freesia?

"Where the hell did that come from?"

"This." Laurent pulled a gun. Instinctively, I drew my own piece and fired. _Shit_.

_Thump. Thump. Thump._ The tell-tale trilogy of shots knocked Laurent back into the wall and he stared down at his chest before looking up at me with a snarl.

"It's empty, you worthless son of a dirty whore! I was trying to show you--" His anger ran out abruptly as his knees hit the pavement. I caught him as he slumped over and pushed him back up against the wall.

"Stay with me, Laurent. I didn't mean it! Instinct! You know how I'm trained!" His dead weight let me know it was pointless to continue and I swore. Leaning into him to keep him trapped up against the wall, I whipped out my phone and typed out an emergency text:

_How long do those tranq darts last?_

Alice replied back almost instantly._--Who did you shoot?_

_Laurent. Answer the question._

_--Carlisle wants to know how many darts made impact._

_All three. _

_--How much does he weigh?_

_A fucking ton_, I thought, shifting him around.

_Maybe 180?_

There was a moment of radio silence, which I used to prop Laurent up more comfortably on the wall. I slid his gun into my pocket so that his hands were free, and looped them around my neck. To the street, we looked like a pair of lovers. It was embarrassing, but better than looking like I had a corpse on my hands.

_--Around three hours. Why?_

_Shit. I've still got a lot of questions._

_--Why did you do it?_

_Accident. He was showing me something and I reacted too fast._

_--Oops._

_Thank you, Captain Obvious._

_--Anytime._

_--Edward says hi, btw._

_--He wants to know what's going on._

_--He's driving me insane, so throw me a bone here, okay?_

I smiled. I could only imagine how insane Edward was being.

_One bone. James is definitely dead._

_--Good bone._

_That's what she said._

_--If any other she is saying it, you won't have a bone left in your body to bone with. You know, just for the record._

_Love you, babe._

_--Damn well better._

I pocketed the phone and hitched Laurent closer into me while I racked my brain for somewhere we could hide out until he came back around. I cringed as more of his body brushed against me. Who knew getting shot could make someone so happy to see me?

"You're a twisted fucker, you know that?" I muttered at him while I shoved him up further on the wall, wrapping my arms around his waist and lifting him discreetly off the pavement. I kept one eye peeled on the passerby, watching for a gap in the foot traffic. At the first one I saw I leapt for the fire escape we'd taken down the building and raced back for the rooftop.

Flopping him out on the roofing, I realized I'd misjudged the man. He wasn't happy to see me. _Thank God._ Instead, a round silver tube winked at me from his pocket. How many weapons was he packing?

Given that he was probably going to kill me the second he woke up, I figured there was no harm in disarming him in advance. Still, it made my stomach turn over to be emptying his pockets while he was unconscious. It felt a little too invasive and intimate for my personal taste.

Not that feelings were going to stop me from doing it. Laurent was going to be one pissed off motherfucker when he woke up, and I didn't want him armed. Who knew what he was packing?

I edged around next to him and tried to prop his pocket open with one hand and slip out his weapon with the other. _Don't mind me, buddy. Just saving my own ass here._

From an old-fashioned film canister, apparently. I shook it. Whatever was in there wasn't film, unless film had started rattling. My curiosity kicked in. What was this all about?

There was still another lump in his pocket, a round one further down._ In for a penny, _I thought, moving fast.

A tarnished silver pocket watch. A quick pat down revealed that was all he was carrying other than some cash.

I eyed Laurent's Rolex clad wrist, then looked back at what I had in my hand. Right. My GQ loving, Rolex-wearing buddy was carting around an old pocket watch and a film canister from another era, while armed with a gun that belonged in one of Carlisle's labs. He would tell me all about it when he woke up.

In 2 hours and 45 minutes.

All I had to do was wait.

Just wait. Patiently.

I shook the film canister again. Four. There were four little things rattling around in there.

I waited some more.

The gun wasn't loaded, and it was definitely a dart gun, just not one I'd seen before. It was empty, so I had no idea what had been inside. I mentally congratulated myself for shooting an unarmed man, then took a picture of it and sent it to Alice. She confirmed that it wasn't one of ours and sent a quick video of Edward pacing the kitchen, looking like the victim of every hangover that ever was and gulping down coffee like a champ.

_--Told you he was off the tea._

_Yes, Alice, you're right. You're always right._

_--Do I sense sarcasm?_

_Love you, babe._

I checked my watch. Two hours and 20 minutes. I could totally do this. I just had to wait a little bit more, and then I could ask Laurent about all this stuff.

The watch had been on a chain once, which you could see by the broken loop at the top. It was pretty tarnished, but I thought I could make out an inscription on the outside. In Russian. Which was fine, because Laurent read Russian and he could tell me what it said.

When he woke up.

In two hours and 15 minutes.

I sent a photo to Alice of my face, pouting. _Wish you were here._

_--If you hadn't left in such a rush, I would be there._

_Thank you for pointing that out, dear. But then who would have taken care of Edward?_

_--Edward is not six. He can take care of himself._

_As a vampire, maybe. As a human he's a mess._

_--Edward says thank you._

_Has he showered yet today?_

Alice sent me a picture of Edward with arrows pointing to his bed head, his stubble, and the coffee stains on his shirt. _Exhibit A in the case of real life vs. Edward._

_Alice, would you please call the first witness?_

_--Esme._

_Esme, at any point today has the subject been in contact with water?_

_--Esme says she got him to drink one glass earlier. What does that count for?_

_The State rests. Does the defense have any witnesses?_

_--Edward says to tell you to get a life._

_Sadly, just us immortals up here on the roof. Does the defense have anything else to say?_

A ping came in from Edward directly: _Why don't you do something useful? What else is Laurent carrying?_

Hallelujah! Permission to snoop. Which, apparently, was what I'd been waiting for. I grabbed the case and twisted the top off slowly, then tipped the contents out onto the roof slates next to my shoe. Ever since Carlisle and Edward had started working with tipped darts, I been wary of putting anything I couldn't see into my hand. Chemical reactions from the lab could cause a lot of problems I would just as soon avoid.

The prudence was worth it, because the canister had darts inside. There were three green ones and one brown one that looked like it had been fired and recovered. Standard procedure whenever possible, since the serums were so damn hard to make. I took a picture and sent it to Alice. _Must be the ammo for the gun._

_--Um . . .hang on._

_What's up?_

_--Edward says to get the serial numbers off the darts._

Serial numbers were a big thing with the lab rats. It was how they tracked which batches were which, although why they thought this passel of strange was going to have our serial numbers on them was a mystery to me. Still, it wasn't like I had anything else to do besides super zoom on the darts.

_Only three have serial numbers, the green ones._ I punched them in and waited. Then I waited some more.

Fuck I hate waiting.

My phone rang. Esme.

"Jasper, don't lose those darts and don't lose Laurent."

I looked at Laurent. He wasn't going anywhere. In the background I could here the sound of Edward being restrained. "What's going on?" I asked, carefully putting the darts back in their canister.

"The darts belong to Edward."

"How the fuck is that even possible?"

"Language, Jasper."

"Yes, Esme." I responded dutifully, even though my mind was racing. "How is that even possible?"

"He says they are the ones he shot at Bella in Italy."

"Can't be," I said, rolling them in my free hand. "They're full and they haven't been used."

There was a pause. "When you say they haven't been used, Jasper, are you implying that the other dart has been fired?"

"I thought that was obvious in the picture. It's about half empty."

There was a sound of keys being pounded and Esme spoke sharply away from the phone. "If you spill coffee on my computer I will end you, Edward."

"Esme," I said, sweetly, unable to resist.

"What?" She snapped, still clicking away at the keyboard. "I'm researching."

There was silence, punctuated by keys pounding.

"Esme?"

"Jasper, you will just have to wait." She hung up.

_Great_, I thought. _Everyone else gets to play together and I have to sit up here by myself with the lump._ Edward wasn't the only one who could act six. I pouted like a champ for a good ten minutes. Still nothing from the phone—they were officially too busy for me now.

I gave Laurent a look and was shocked to see him looking right back at me. He blinked and I jumped about 10 feet straight up.

"Jesus H you sneaky fuck!" I yelled at him from the top of the building exhaust system.

He rolled his eyes up at me. "I might say the same to you, mon ami. However, since I woke up again I am forced to be somewhat grateful." He paused, then spoke again. "How long until I can move my arms and strangle you?"

I climbed cautiously down the chimneystack back to him and checked my watch. "The darts only last an hour each. You've got about 45 minutes to go before it's fully worn off, although usually it wears off all at once."

"You and your drugs."

"Well, don't pull a gun on me."

"It wasn't loaded."

"Yeah, well, how was I supposed to know that? We trained together, remember? What's the rule?"

"Fuck Maria," he replied.

"No, the other rule."

"Shoot first." He sighed. "That training caused nothing but trouble."

"Maria caused nothing but trouble."

He grunted his agreement. "This is why she is dead and we both pretend she never was." He seemed to tense for a moment, and then gave up with a roll of his eyes. "Stupid cow of a woman." He gave another long sigh of capitulation, and then spoke reluctantly. "Fine, I forgive you. Now sit me up so I can explain my toys."

"Your toys?" I asked, propping him against the chimneystack.

He grimaced as his head lolled over. "This is so undignified."

"Like I said, 45 more minutes."

"I hate waiting."

"Well, we have that in common." I regarded him for a moment, then started with the darts, shaking the little canister in front of his face. "What are these doing here?"

He grinned. "So, I was following her, right?"

"Yeah."

"And she'd been shot, right?"

"Yeah."

"So she's distracted, right?"

"Yeah."

"She forgot her purse."

"Laurent, do you honestly expect me to believe that a woman forgot her purse?"

He grinned even wider. "You know she is no ordinary woman . . . or at least she wasn't."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"You smelled it."

"The freesia?"

He pulled his head up with effort and then let it drop, effectively nodding. "Her humanity."

"Again, how is that possible?"

"You have her things from my pockets?"

"If you mean the watch and this canister, then yes."

His grin dropped. "Okay, so the gun is James' big idea. He will go in and shoot her with the darts, and she is supposed to collapse, right? Then he can bring her to the Volturi and make up for the problem of Italy."

"That's a stupid fucker's plan."

"Well, James was a stupid fucker. We are agreed. I stay outside, he goes in."

"He doesn't come out."

"Correct. Now I have a problem. Do I go in after James? Do I leave? Do I wait? I want nothing to do with this plan."

I frowned. "Couldn't you just call the Volturi and tell them where she is?"

He shook his head. "No. They are not interested in her now."

Well, that was big news. "What gives?"

Laurent grinned a sly little grin. "They are afraid of her."

"They controlled her."

He laughed. "No, they thought they controlled her. They thought they had her contained through James. But they were very, very wrong. They thought they had a tamed weapon, but she was still wild at heart. They pushed too hard, and she threatened them."

"She threatened them how?"

He looked around briefly, then whispered, "It was about that night."

"What night?"

"You are an idiot, you know that? _**THE**_ night."

"Right, okay, but again, how does one woman threaten all of the Volturi?"

He glared at me and hissed. "She kills our kind! Is that not threat enough?"

"She kills our kind for them!"

"In her own time, in her own way. Never on their schedule. " He looked right at me. "They couldn't stop themselves. They pushed."

"Elaborate."

"They met with her and James that day. They were angry with her."

"Why? She had Edward wrapped around her little finger. Twice."

"Right. But she had no plan to kill him."

"Laurent, she was hired to kill him."

His eyes twinkled at me. "Again, the Volturi thought they were dealing with someone who could be bought. Maybe even threatened. Certainly bossed around. One of their sheep, you know? Someone like James."

"You said James was there?"

"Yes, he told me about it later. The big wigs were in town, and they wanted her to move things along." He lowered his voice and leaned forward a little, pleased at his ability to move and thrilled to be sharing some good gossip. "So they wait for her at the apartment she is sharing with James and they give her an ultimatum. She kills Edward that night, or they get someone else."

"And this is a threat to her how? She could always walk away from the job."

"You fucking idiot." He tried to thump me one, but his arm wouldn't move. I grinned at him and he scowled back. "She was enjoying Edward's company."

"She hates Edward."

"Did she say that?"

I gave him a look. "It wasn't like we were all playing confidante in those days."

"Right. Well, the Volturi try to push her along, and she gets mad. She says these things take time, these things can not be rushed, and so on and so on. Well, you know Aro. No excuses for him."

I nodded. No excuses, indeed.

"So Aro pushes on her and she fires right back. She says if anything goes wrong, she will blame them for rushing the job."

I thought about that. I thought about all the things that had gone wrong. I thought about how that might look. I grinned. "The Volturi think she's gunning for them."

Laurent nodded. "They had a fail safe. The bomb at the villa. But she was not at the villa when the bomb went off, according to the statement Alice gave the police."

I nodded. "She'd jumped, but they didn't know that until later. So as far as the Volturi are concerned, she didn't do the job and she disappeared into the night."

"Yes. And she was angry when she left."

I nodded again. "They blamed her for Greece, didn't they?"

"That was not her?"

I shook my head. "Alice was pissed about losing the villa."

He smiled. "Then they are running scared for nothing. I like that."

"So what was James's angle?"

Laurent's smile disappeared abruptly. He sat for a moment and scowled into the sunset. "James was tired of playing her manager. He was tired of being a lackey. He wanted the power." He stared into the setting sun, contemplating. "He was trading her."

"What?"

"It was a deal. She was to do Edward, then Alice, then you, then Carlisle. All of the big enemies, gone. Then they were going to kill her, and James was going to be a full member as a reward for arranging it all."

I just sat there, stunned. _All of us? Bella was going to off all of us?_ "She agreed to that?"

"She had only agreed to Edward. She didn't know about the rest. James was feeding her information one piece at a time. He didn't want her to suspect the big plot. He knew she would kill him if she found out she was being used."

"The Volturi knew who she was, then."

"They suspected. It was a good guess that paid off." He sat all the way up and wrapped his hands around his knees. "It would have been the ultimate revenge for them, to use her against you."

"And now their plan is shit."

"Yes, now their plan is shit. And they are very worried. This is why they do not hunt her. They want to make peace, especially after Greece, but they do not know how much she knows. . . or has figured out. They do not want to antagonize her further."

"What about James? He had no problem antagonizing her."

Laurent shook his head. "James was always power hungry. He loved her for what she could do for him, especially since she would kill for him. At first. I think he knew his control was slipping, and he knew she was a danger. It all blew up in his face. They only let him live because they thought it might upset her more if they killed him. But he lost it all. All his chances. He was back to being a nobody in their world."

"Until you smelled the blood."

He nodded. "The gun was stolen. It's based on one of your designs, but the Volturi don't know what they are doing. James thought to shoot her and take her back to them so they could kill her. So they could rest easy. He thought it would contain her."

"Not so much, huh?"

He shook his head. "Not so much. From what I could hear, he was dead within the first five minutes."

"She works fast."

"I think she knew he'd betrayed her. Besides, he always was an asshole."

We both nodded to that. He put a hand out and I helped him to his feet, dusting him off and making sure he didn't go toppling over the edge of the roof. He saw the watch laying on the ground and nodded to it.

"She didn't carry much with her. Just the gun, the darts, and that watch. Well, and some money, but I'm keeping that, if you don't mind."

"She might."

He grinned. "Once a thief, always a thief. Besides, she doesn't care about money."

"Like you know her so well."

"Better than you think."

I let that go. There were a lot of holes in Bella's past, and I wasn't sure I really wanted to fill them all in right now. Laurent was eying the edge of the roof like he was itching to make a getaway. I knew Esme wanted me to keep him, but there was no way I could take him in now. He wouldn't let me shoot him again, and I didn't want to, anyway. We were survivors who pretended the past never happened, and being together would bring it all up again. He didn't want that, and I didn't want that. Not with Alice in the picture now. She didn't need to know about those days. None of them did. We had enough problems in the present.

"Tell me how you got her stuff."

"I told you. James shot her."

"And then you showed me the gun."

"Yes. And then you shot me, like a bastard."

"And you lived. Get over it."

He rolled his eyes. "I waited until she came out. I waited all day. It was excruciating." His eyes met mine and I nodded. Fuck waiting. "She came out with a black bag and staggered up the street. She smelled and she did not look good."

"James hurt her?"

He shook his head sharply. "I don't think she was reacting well to the change."

"Have you tried it?"

He shuddered. "Once was enough, thank you."

"That she was even up and moving the same day is pretty impressive. He must have missed her."

Laurent nodded at the film canister. "I think she pulled one out early and kept it. I don't know what the others were from—they were not from James's collection."

"Edward thinks they're his, but he doesn't know how she got them." _Well, look at me, volunteering information!_ Alice would kick my ass if she knew. "Maybe Italy, that night."

Laurent shrugged. "Some people keep strange souvenirs."

I held up the pocket watch. "Like this one?"

He smiled. "I like that one. You know what it says?"

I shook my head. "It's in Russian."

"It says 'It's always a good time to come home.'"

I laughed. "That is a good sentiment."

"Yes. She will miss that."

"How did you get it?"

"I told you, from her purse. It was on the roof, just before the trail ended. She was running after the blast and left it behind."

"That's not like her."

Laurent shrugged again. "I said she was sick."

"Where's the bag?"

"I ditched it once it was empty. What kind of man carries a purse?"

I thought about that for a while. Laurent sighed and looked off into the distance. He tapped his watch meaningfully. I shrugged and gave in. Esme could yell at me later. "Anything else?"

He shook his head. "When you find her—if you find her—tell her I mean her no harm. I am out of this. Out."

"Right," I said. "You're out."

"Just one more thing." He beckoned me closer, and I stepped up . . . like a total sucker. He nailed me right in the jaw with a left hook that sent me reeling back onto my ass. Then he jumped to the next roof, where he could yell at me in relative safety. "Don't you ever shoot me again, Jasper Whitlock." He shook his fist. "Never again."

I shook my fist back at him and he took off over the rooftops at lightening speed, laughing. I rubbed my jaw. Laurent had always been a better hand-to-hand man than I had been, and he'd clearly been working out. With his new technique, it felt like I'd been hit by a ton of bricks.

Pulling myself back together, I gathered up the canister, made sure the lid was on tight, and put it into my pocket. I grinned as I looked at the watch. I liked the inscription. Cheeky, yet tender.

I wound the top of the watch and was surprised to hear it spring to life. I popped open the side and as I suspected, the inside face was filigreed just like that outside.

I didn't suspect that there would be a photo tucked into the other side. Squinting at the trio of faces, I started to laugh at the 1940's era hairdo on Bella. Edward was going to cream himself when he got a load of this one!

My laughter died off in my throat when my brain processed who the other two people in the photograph were, and in the back of my brain, music started to play.

"_It's a small world after all, it's a small world after all."_

Laurent hadn't said anything about this. Had he even looked? We both knew these faces, from the days that neither of us acknowledged anymore.

_Hello Rose._ _Hello Emmett.  
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**AN: All my love for reading, and review, review, review!**


	8. Chapter 7: Freaks of the Week

**AN: Thanks to Project Team Beta, for amazing editing, to Furious Kitten, for helping me fix the ending, to Stephanie Meyer for inventing my characters, and to each and every one of you for reading.**

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**~: Chapter 7: Freaks of the Week :~**

_Room 418, St. Petersburg, Ben Cheney_

"Hello, Emmett."

No, too tentative.

"Hey, Emmett. What's up?"

Too casual.

"Hello, Emmett. I'm so glad you're here I don't even know where to begin. Please don't let her eat me."

Definitely too desperate. It was hard not to seem desperate given the situation.

_Keep it together, Ben. Just a few more hours._ Right. Just a few more hours and his vampire not-uncle would be here to rescue him from his vampire not-aunt. After which he would be free to get on with his life, provided he survived the rescue experience.

Nothing to worry about, according to Gramps. Emmett was totally going to be able to handle her. According to Gramps, she always listened to Emmett. He was going to be fine. It was all going to be fine, according to Gramps.

Of course, according to Gramps, vampires also never slept, sweated, or snored. Aunt Tanya was currently doing all three. For fun, she tossed, turned, kicked, and muttered, apparently having nightmares.

Ben would be having nightmares, too, but he'd decided that turning off the light with a vampire in the room just wasn't going to happen. Sleeping was out of the question because he wanted to wake up alive. _Just a few more hours._ He splashed some cold water on his face and exited the bathroom, reassuring himself with each step that he was going to live.

There was a moan from the lump on the bed in the corner, and Ben froze, every nerve in his body telling him to run away as fast and as far as he could. Gut instincts were really hard to fight. He knew she was going to regain full consciousness at some point, and he really wasn't prepared for it.

_Are you there, God? It's me, Ben Cheney. I know we haven't talked much lately, but I'd really like to have the chance to get to know you better. To do that, I need you to help me live through the next few hours, okay? I'm too young to die. Way, way, way too young to die._

The room phone rang and Ben jumped about ten feet in the air, landing in a full-on defensive crouch. Who even had this number?

From under the covers on the bed, a pale hand shot out, capturing the phone on the second ring. Aunt Tanya lifted the phone off the receiver and pulled it swiftly back under the covers, offering a soft and non-descript greeting. _Shit, _thought Ben. _This isn't going to end well._

There was a moment of silence, and then the covers fell away slowly as Aunt Tanya sat up. With one hand she pushed her matted hair off her face and with the other hand she extended the receiver.

"It's for you."

Ben eyed the phone like it was a live snake.

Aunt Tanya frowned, a crease appearing between her eyebrows as her eyes flickered between the phone and Ben. She shook the phone at him again. "It's for you."

"Who is it?" Ben asked, keeping his distance while his inner safe-keeper begged to be allowed to bolt.

"Your manager. Peter?" Her voice held a question, as if she may not have heard correctly.

_Fuck my life, _thought Ben. Of course it was his manager. Nobody else had the room number, and nobody else wanted his ass on a platter for canceling on the fight.

Nobody else had just set up a situation where he had to take a phone from the hand of a hungry vampire.

A hungry vampire who was shaking the phone at him again. No, actually, her whole arm was shaking, like the phone was too heavy for her to be holding it out like that. He frowned. Weren't vampires supposed to be super strong?

"You want him to call back?" Her voice was a little shaky, too. Ben shook his head.

"I'll talk to him." He crossed the room and took the phone. Aunt Tanya slumped back down, breathing heavily from the exertion, and Ben took a seat on the edge of the bed across from her. She had dark circles under her eyes like she hadn't just slept for nearly forty straight hours, and her gaze was firmly fixed off in the distance as she panted.

"Ben? Ben, are you even there?"

What? Oh, right, the phone. "Yeah, I'm here. What's up?"

"Was that the aunt?"

"Yeah."

"She feeling better?"

"What's it to you?"

His manager huffed. "Just showing some concern, which is more than you're doing for your career."

"She's awake now, if that's what you're asking. Thanks a lot for that, by the way." Ben meant that on a number of levels, one of which was promising God anything he wanted in exchange for a continued pulse. "You should have called the cell."

"I know you, Ben. You're asshole enough to see the caller ID and not pick up."

Ben sighed. It was true. That didn't mean it was nice to say out loud. Why was he antagonizing his manager over all this, anyway? He couldn't remember. "Look, I'm sorry, okay? And yes, I'm being an asshole. Again. Now what do you want?"

"Courtesy. Some respect. A winning lottery ticket."

"Keep dreaming. Is there a point to this call, or are you just bored?"

"Remember that fight yesterday? The one you were supposed to be at?" Peter chuckled as Ben sighed. "Good, you remember. Well, guess who else didn't show up for the fight?"

"Mother Teresa."

"Very funny, Ben. Your opponent, James. James did not show up for the fight."

"So? It wasn't like he had anybody to fight."

"But he did! They'd re-matched him when you cancelled, although they couldn't get a hold of his manager to confirm it. In fact, nobody could get a hold of his manager."

"So? It's weird, but maybe they left the country. What do I care if James and Laurent pulled a no-show?" From the bed, Aunt Tanya suddenly sat up again, hissing at him. Ben pulled the phone closer to his ear and turned slightly away from her in alarm.

"Peter, I'm going to have to go."

"No! Give me that phone." His auntie was all kinds of worked up. Ben handed the phone over without a fight. Some battles were just not worth it and this was definitely one of them._ Just a few more hours. . .  
_

"Ben doesn't want to talk about it, but I'm dying to hear about the fight and his missing opponents. I feel so bad about all of this." Ben's eyebrows went up. His auntie was definitely turning the charm level up to eleven with the huskiness of her voice. It was like she knew that flirting could get you everywhere with Peter. "Tell me everything you know, Peter. Tell me now. When were they last seen?"

Watching as she listened intently, Ben could see the tension in every line of her body. Her voice might be overly sweet, but it was at odds with the rest of her. She looked like a disaster zone—shirt torn, hair going everywhere, dark circles under her eyes—but her focus on the phone was absolute. Gradually, though, she relaxed as Peter babbled on, and then suddenly she was apologizing to Peter for the inconvenience, playing up how lucky it had been that she had found Ben in time, how unfortunate it was that she had these seizures, everybody in the family worked so hard to keep her out of the hospital, so nice of Ben to take on this inconvenience, Peter you were just too kind, blah, blah, blah. She hung up the phone with a smile.

The smile dropped the second the phone was back in the cradle. "You're safe," she said. "James can't get you from where he is now, and Laurent appears to be long gone."

Ben just looked at her, raising an eyebrow. "That whole charm show with Peter was just to find out about James and Laurent?"

"What?" she asked, collapsing back into her pillows. "It's not like I could tell him the truth."

Ben would have liked to have heard the truth, but Aunt Tanya just pulled the covers back over her head. Within seconds, she was snoring again, and Ben was back where he'd started, waiting for Emmett and wondering exactly when reality had stepped out.

Ben jerked awake with a gasp. He hadn't meant to fall asleep. All the lights were blazing, and he was sitting uncomfortably at the desk chair. According to his watch, several hours had disappeared, and the mid-afternoon light flooded the room.

A quick glance revealed that his auntie was still under the covers. Standing, he checked his neck in the mirror, feeling like a guilty bastard for doubting his safety but wanting to make sure he hadn't been a snack for the undead while he was off in dreamland. It was fine for Dad and Gramps to trust Aunt Tanya completely—from the safety of Ontario.

A soft knock at the door caught his attention, and he walked over, trying to peek through the eyehole but not seeing anything. He checked the chain and cracked the door warily.

"Hello?"

There was a soft chuckle from outside his field of vision. "Cautious. I like it."

"Who's out there?"

His so-called uncle, Emmett, stepped into the light, looking just like his pictures but bigger. Ben checked the hall fixtures for reference. No, maybe not that big or tall. He just had _presence_, filling the hallway with a certain authoritative strength that brooked no arguments. He wore all black with the thick cabling of his fisherman's sweater setting off the sharp angles of his jaw. Underneath short dark blond hair, topaz eyes flicked up and down the crack in the door, assessing Ben's caution and then asserting themselves.

"Let me in, Ben. I've come to help."

Unlatching the chain, Ben felt his inner chickenshit resist the urge to fling itself at Emmett's feet and sob with relief. Thankfully, before the blubbering started, his outer macho managed to deliver a solidly spoken, "Good to see you," and not flinch at Emmett's cool handshake.

Emmett, at least, fit perfectly with Gramps' descriptions of vampires. With inhuman speed, he entered the room, setting a black leather duffel bag down inside the doorway. Ben locked the door behind him and then watched, puzzled, as Emmett just stood in the entryway.

"She's asleep over there," Ben volunteered, surprised when Emmett snorted.

"She's no more asleep than you are."

The figure under the covers snored loudly in response. Emmett chuckled again and then proved his point by marching over to the bed and ripping the covers off, revealing an indignantly faking Aunt Tanya.

She flipped him the bird and scowled. "What are you doing here?"

Emmett regarded her for a moment, hands on his hips and a pensive look on his face. Ben watched from the edge of the room as a whole conversation seemed to happen between the two vampires without a word being uttered. He was completely unprepared for the audible dialogue, which Emmett precluded with a massive sniff.

"You smell."

Aunt Tanya grinned and then grimaced. "How bad is it?"

"I don't know what you've been up to lately, but before you start explaining everything to me, and I do mean everything, you are going to have a shower."

"That bad?"

"Worse than you can even imagine."

She sighed and pushed herself off the bed with an effort. Tentatively, she made her way toward the bathroom, grabbing on to pieces of furniture for balance along the way. As she approached the final stretch, Ben suddenly realized that he was between her and the bathroom.

He tried to sidestep at the same time she did, but she lost her balance and crashed into him, fisting his shirt to keep from completely falling over. Ben didn't even realize he'd started hyperventilating until Emmett spoke.

"Relax. At this point, she's just as human as you are."

"What's that supposed to mean?" asked Aunt Tanya, hoisting herself back up and reaching for the bathroom door.

"Don't tell me you don't know how you feel. You're breathing, your heart is racing, and your reflexes are complete shit. You're human."

"How is that even possible?" gasped Ben, mentally talking his heart rate down out of the stratosphere.

Emmett gave Aunt Tanya a thorough once over before replying, taking in her tattered clothes and ragged appearance, before replying. "I don't know exactly, but as soon as she doesn't reek like the recycled dead, she's going to tell us all about it. Isn't that right, Tatyana?"

Aunt Tanya flipped them off again as she stepped into the bathroom and shut the door with an angry bang. It wasn't until the sound of the shower started that either one of them relaxed.

Ben reached up to rub the back of his neck nervously just as Emmett started to do the same. With a wry chuckle, Emmett completed the gesture and glanced around the room. His eyes flickered over the beds—one pristine and one rumpled—Ben's open suitcase, his phone in its cradle, the desk, the window, and back past Ben to the bathroom door. He sighed and took a seat on the edge of the made bed.

"Well, that went about as well as I could have expected, really. You holding up okay?"

Ben nodded and plopped himself back in his old friend, the desk chair. "Yeah, I guess so." He shrugged. "Stories from Gramps sound a lot less crazy now."

"He tell you a lot about her?" Emmett's tone was neutral.

"She's the aunt. She likes raw deer, cooking Russian food although not she's not as good as Aunt Rose, and scaring the snot out of the local stray dog population. I'm supposed to be nice to her or he'll off me in my sleep."

Emmett guffawed. "I can picture your Gramps trying to off you in your sleep. Feisty bastard. Always was." Emmett's eyes flicked over Ben again. "Never had your size, though. I bet you could take him."

Ben's brain tried to process getting into a real fight with Gramps, recoiled from the thought, and just blurted out the first thing that popped into his head. "Dad would feed me to the wolves."

That garnered another laugh from Emmett. Ben hadn't realized humans were that funny to vampires. Maybe it was the paranoia and the stress?

"Why are wolves so funny?"

"Your auntie thinks they're secretly people, and she's scared to death of them. It was the only way to tease her growing up. . . no wonder it's still a family threat!"

"Why is she scared of wolves? Gramps says she'll eat anything."

Emmett sobered up. "That she will." One crisp, serious nod accented the statement as he repeated it, "That she will."

He stood again and started to pace the room, raising the tension level. "Do you know what she's been eating lately?" Ben just looked at him. "Okay, do you know _who_ she's been eating lately?" Ben kept up his stare. "Right. You don't want to think about what she eats."

Ben nodded. "There's a lot of stuff on the news, and I think she ate Gramps' dad, but that was a long time ago."

"Correct. That was a long time ago. Did she tell you about that?"

"She's been talking a lot in her sleep. Nightmares or something like that. Freaking me the hell out to be perfectly honest."

"Good." Ben shot him a look, and Emmett amended his statement, "Well, not the freaking. Just the talking. That's good. How about a starting place? What's she been saying?"

Ben rubbed the back of his neck again. "Where do I even start? In English? In Russian? Stuff that probably happened thirty or even fifty years ago? She's been all over the map."

"How about names? Throw me some names."

"Okay." Ben considered the collected ramblings of the last two days. "Rose is awesome. You're awesome. She loves you guys. She's sorry about Gramps' nightmares, and Grandma is prettier than her picture. Victoria is a sad bitch. Fucking Laurent fucking everywhere, double dipping little swine tit, or something like that." Emmett laughed and Ben pressed on, "James is a douche. Edward has a gun. My dad shouldn't have been an accountant; he's smarter than that. Riley's shipping service is shitty; kids should mail first class. Fuck the postal service. Aro can go to hell. The Vultures—"

"Volturi," Emmett corrected, watching in amusement as the litany continued.

"Whatever. The Volturi can all go to hell. She picked a basket. Arkady isn't supposed to be alive. Poor Arkady, that poor grandma. Her apartment will never be the same; she'll burn them back for Amalfi because it was too quiet. Felix's knife is in the purse with the plastic, but it's too damn big. Out damn spot, the wolves are coming. Wolves, Bells, wolves, woods, Canada, Germany, woods. James is a bastard. That's about all. I'm probably leaving some stuff out, but it ran together a lot, and it doesn't make a lot of sense to me."

"No, probably not. It doesn't make that much sense to me either. Not all of it. We haven't been on great speaking terms for a while, and she liked to gloss over stuff anyway when she. . . after she hooked up with James." He looked away out the window at that, twitching the curtains aside to look out over the street again.

"James is her husband?" Ben let his confusion echo in his voice. "He's dead twice."

Emmett turned around sharply. "James is dead?"

"Uh, I think so. If he's not dead, she's having a lot of fantasies about killing him. I mean, I guess you guys don't really get divorced when you live forever and so. . . " Ben let his voice trail off. Emmett wasn't listening. He had whipped a cell phone out and pressed it up to his ear. His lips were moving, but Ben couldn't hear a damn thing.

Super sonic vampire speech. He'd been warned, but damn. Just damn.

The shower stopped.

Emmett hung up the phone. They both turned and looked at the bathroom door.

Nothing.

The hair dryer came on and Emmett sat on the edge of the bed, checking his watch. Ben rocked back in the desk chair.

Emmett checked his watch. Ben looked at his feet. His toenails needed clipping, but it could wait.

Emmett checked his watch again, the movement causing Ben to raise his head. Their eyes met, and they both gave the same grimace of male disgust before Emmett got up and went to the window, checking the street again.

"Watching for somebody?" Ben asked, trying for casual and almost making it. _Vampire hordes are after you! Run for your life! _was screaming through his brain.

"Just a habit. No one should know we're here because no one has known where she was for some time. It's been an issue of concern."

"Oh?" Ben's voice was a little squeaky. _Creatures of the night are waiting just outside your field of vision to suck your blood! Abandon all hope now!_

"Not for us. For others. Remember she's a danger to others."

_Others. Right. Just a danger to others._ "But what about now?"

"Human won't last." Emmett spoke of the human condition casually, like it was a trend on its way out already. "We should feed her though. I bet she's hungry."

"She mentioned that." _About a hundred fucking times, actually_. Ben just hadn't known what she was hungry for, although his overworked brain had given him _plenty _of suggestions. He picked up the room service menu off the desk and crossed to the phone by the bed. "What do you think she likes?"

"I have no idea. We never knew her as a human."

"Oh." Ben processed that, freaked a little, and then just rolled with it. "I'll ask her then."

"She doesn't know. She doesn't remember her human life." Emmett looked out the window again, still way too casual for Ben's racing mind.

"She was human before? There aren't vampire babies?"

Emmett's shoulders slumped a bit before he answered slowly. "No, there are no vampire babies. We're. . . we're oddities of nature. Frozen as we were and never more to be."

Ben didn't have anything to say to that, and something in Emmett's tone told him the subject wasn't really open for discussion. "I'll just get doubles of the stuff I like, okay?"

Emmett nodded, then flicked the drapes shut and marched smartly back to the bathroom door. As Ben finished ordering, he knocked lightly.

"Go away. I'm drying my hair."

"It's dry enough."

"Go away, Emmett."

"You have until the count of three and then I'm taking this door down. One, two. . . "

The door flew open and Emmett leapt back just in time to avoid Ben's shaving kit. The mini soaps followed, trailed by the shampoos and a wet washcloth.

"I didn't want you. I wanted Rose!"

"Rose is indisposed. Besides, I'm better at fighting if it comes to that."

"I can fight for myself."

"Oh, really?" Emmett stepped forward into the bathroom, shoving the door out of the way. There was a shriek, and then Ben got an eyeful of his aunt's legs as Emmett hauled her out of the bathroom like a sack of potatoes. There was a flurry of sparks and a twang as the blow dryer came out of the wall.

Clad only in a towel and hissing, his auntie's sudden perch on the desk would have been cute under other circumstances. As it was, Ben was pretty sure that the first one to laugh was going to die, even if she had to beat them to death with a mini soap.

"Why aren't you dressed?" asked Emmett sternly.

"I don't have any other clothes and I don't want to put my leathers back on. They—"

"Smell. Yes, I know." He pulled a brown paper packet out of the black leather duffel and tossed it to her. "Rose remembered your size."

Aunt Tanya missed the catch but pulled the packet close and ripped it open. "Pink? She got me pink? What does she think I am, twelve? I'm not wearing this!"

Emmett reached back in the bathroom and threw the leathers at her. "Then put these on again. You're eating and then we're going."

His auntie didn't even pick up the leathers from the floor. "When does the food get here?"

Ben spoke up. "About thirty minutes."

"Fine." She huffed her way back into the bathroom with the shreds of her pride and the pink clothes. Emmett picked up her clothes and rifled through the pockets like a professional before dumping them in the trash.

"What did you find?"

Emmett showed him. There was a set of passports in various names and a crumpled, wrinkled mess of about a dozen photos, retrieved from a pocket down the leg. Some Ben recognized as the duplicates hung in his own house: his grandfather as a boy, a family photo from his own childhood, and several of Rose and Emmett. There was one of Aunt Tanya that had clearly been ripped in half to remove an ex, and another that looked older than the rest of her smiling in the arms of a tall man with black eyes.

Emmett set that one aside and put the rest in his own pocket. "She'll want these later."

"I'll want what later?" asked Aunt Tanya, coming back out from the bathroom. The blouse was the only pink that showed. With the dark jeans, it didn't look so bad, thought Ben. Out of her leathers, she was less drunk-whore and more straight up hot. _Vampire aunt! Knock it off, you perv, knock it off!_

"Your pictures back."

"Oh yeah. I have the watch in my purse, too." Tanya started looking around for it. Emmett looked at Ben, and Ben shook his head. No purse.

"Um, you just kind of fell out of the sky with nothing." Ben didn't catch all of what followed—his Russian didn't extend to guttersnipe swearing. She was pissed, that was for sure, and Laurent was a douche in there somewhere, and James was dead again.

Emmett interrupted the tirade. "About James. . ."

She shut up abruptly. "I don't want to talk about it."

He nodded and picked up the photo off the desk. "You want to talk about this?"

"No."

"Great. So, tell me about James."

"He shot me."

"Obviously with something good, too. When?"

She looked at Ben. He shrugged, checking his watch. "I've only had you for two days and change."

"Almost three days ago."

Emmett whistled and walked slowly around Tanya, inspecting her. "You're in good shape if it's that recent. What did he have?"

"I had a sample in my purse."

"Well, we can ask him about it."

Tanya glared. "I burned him already."

_Vampire divorce was a real bitch, _thought Ben. _Still if he was shooting at her. . ._

"I take it you broke up, then?" asked Emmett.

"A while ago."

"Really?" Emmett made disbelief sound very, very subtle.

Another huff from his aunt. "Three years ago. I don't want to talk about it."

"Fine," said Emmett, going back to the photo. "When was this, and why haven't we heard about it?"

The silence was deafening. Emmett cleared his throat, and Aunt Tanya broke down.

"I don't know! I found it in Italy when he—" She clamped her mouth shut again abruptly.

"Keeping good company?" She just glared. Emmett prodded. "I think you're human in this picture."

"Don't think I haven't thought about that, too," she hissed, spinning around and sitting on the bed next to Ben. He tried to be subtle about scooting away, repeating _danger to others, danger to others_ without much luck.

"Any leads?"

"I've been trying to keep a low profile."

Ben laughed. He couldn't help it. _God, why do you let me sign my own death warrants in all caps?_

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Have you seen the news?" Ben said. "You've made every local channel."

Both Emmett and Tanya swore. In unison. Same phrases, too. It would have been vamptastic had it not translated as, "We're fucked."

There was a knock at the door. All three of them jumped into a fighting stance. Ben shook himself loose from his panic first and walked over to the door, cracking it slightly. There was a moan behind him as the smell of meat and potatoes drifted in. Whipping out his wallet, Ben paid the bellhop at warp speed and turned around to discover he'd grown a shadow.

"That's my food." Her eyes were wide and her mouth was visibly watering.

Deciding not to point out that some of it was supposed to be his, too, Ben pulled the covers off the dishes and used them as shields when his auntie dove in for the kill. He thought he was being pretty subtle about it until he caught Emmett shaking with laughter out of the corner of his eye. "What?"

"Danger to others, Ben. She's only a danger to others." They both watched her suck down food at an alarming pace, moaning and exclaiming over the flavors. Ben was glad he'd decided against fighting her for his share.

"Won't she get sick, eating that fast?"

Emmett shrugged. "Maybe later. I don't really know." He walked past the ongoing carnage of auntie's first meal and started picking up the scattered pieces of Ben's shaving set. "Pack up. When she's done, we move."

Silverware clattered down. "Where are we going?"

"Somewhere safe." Emmett was deliberately vague, and Ben was surprised to see that when it came to his auntie, he, too, could recognize human panic when he saw it.

"I don't want to go with you."

"Do you have a better plan? Rose isn't mad at you. It was all about James anyway, and now that he's gone we can. . . ," Emmett gave an eloquent shrug, "we can put that chapter behind us."

Tanya did not look terribly convinced, but she started eating again, chewing thoughtfully. "I have a safe place here," she offered as Ben threw the last of his things in his bag.

"No good."

Her nostrils flared. "It's very good. And if I can't have my purse back, I want my other things."

"Which is more important, your other things or your human life?" Emmett straightened up and handed Ben his kit, tossing the other detritus from the bathroom into the trashcan by the desk.

"I don't want to give everything up just like that." She tried to snap her fingers and failed to make a sound. Frowning, she tried again and again, getting agitated that it didn't seem to be working. Emmett came over and stilled her hand.

"It'll get better."

"What if it doesn't?" she whispered. "I don't know how to be a human."

"So, what are you going to do?"

She just stood there, holding Emmett's hand and looking at Ben. Her vamp-style bravado was gone, leaving her coming across as lost and forlorn.

With tomato ketchup on her shirt. Ben pointed and she looked down, tears welling up in her eyes as she grabbed for a napkin to dab it off.

"Shit, shit, shit. I don't even know how to eat."

"You'll learn." Emmett paused. "So, are you coming with me or are you staying here?"

She threw down the napkin and just stared at it for a long moment before giving a monstrous sigh. Silence reigned, punctuated only by the sound of a stomach gurgling ominously. About the same time Ben realized that it wasn't his stomach rumbling, a look of serious alarm crossed his auntie's face.

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Forty minutes and six courses later, Ben swore as the second taxi sped right by them. Auntie darling was hanging onto the parking meter next to him for dear life, her wide eyes darting everywhere with the panic only the dramatically nauseous can pull off with panache.

Emmett had been efficient. Realizing what was about to happen, he'd hauled the gurgling Tanya into the bathroom at vamp speed. Ben had sympathy vomited into the trash can by the desk, ensuring that both of them were feeling like shit while standing out on the sidewalk.

"You going to be okay?" Ben turned his attention back to his auntie, who was definitely not doing well.

"I'm touching things."

Oh yeah. Emmett had been adamant about her not touching things on the way out of the hotel, so Ben had carried her to the curb while Emmett stayed behind to deal with the room. It was all in Peter's name anyway, but Emmett had wanted to make some special arrangements to get the room cleaned quickly. Still, they were outside now, and Ben was equally adamant about not getting puked on.

"It'll be fine. We're outside now, and we're going to get a cab in a minute, so we're good."

She shook her head. "They'll smell me."

The unholy terrors implied by that _they_ were all it took for Ben's paranoia to hit overdrive for the thirty-third time that day. He whipped his auntie back up into his arms and then just stepped in front of the next cab that tried to pass.

Screeching to a halt, the driver leaned out the window and shook his fist at them. Ben opened his mouth, but his auntie supplied the dialogue in a swift, biting tone. Whatever she said, it worked, because the driver threw it into park and hopped out to open the door for them.

Sliding into the back seat, Ben wasn't entirely surprised when his auntie refused to let go of him and sit up on her own. Since the bathroom incident, she was having a hard time managing her motor skills. It was probably for the best, since she hadn't been happy with Emmett's version of decision time.

He let her stay huddled in his lap as he gave directions to the driver, surprised that his voice was steady as the taxi took the corner at top speed. Evidently, some parts of his body were getting used to being around the undead. _Just_ _proves you really can get used to anything,_ he thought, watching the driver nearly nail a lanky blonde guy on his cell phone who was trying to cross the street.

Tanya groaned at the next corner when the speed of the cab threw them both into the side of the backseat.

"You going to make it?" Ben asked, concerned. She was starting to shake again, and her skin felt like it was on fire.

The answer was little more than a strained whisper.

"I don't think so."

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**AN: Fans of **_**Are you there, God? It's me, Margaret **_**may be cringing, but hopefully fans of Ben Cheney {the third} will understand. **

**Fan of Distilling Down? Review, review, review. . . Chapter 8 teasers are waiting!**


	9. Chapter 8: Freesias in the Wind

**For Refolin, Captain of Team WTFIGO. . . here's a few pieces of the puzzle.**

**With apologies to SMeyer and thanks to Furious Kitten, B-Rizzle-Dizzle, and the team at Project Team Beta for the help!**

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**Chapter 8:**

**~: Freesias in the Wind :~**

_St. Petersburg, Jasper's POV_

"I don't think so," I said, stepping back sharply as I nearly got nailed by a racing cab driver. The driver seemed intent on throwing his passengers around the backseat, and I felt a little sorry for the owner of the dark hair that went flying into the side of the car. That had to hurt.

Shaking my head to dismiss Mr. NASCAR from my mind, I continued talking into the phone, opting not to cross the street after all. A bench was over to my left, so I plopped down for a minute. "There hasn't even been a trace of her anywhere that I've looked."

"Look for her more! She's got to be there somewhere. She was just there. Just there! If she's changing she won't be able to move and she can't go far. You have to find her!" Edward's voice rasped into my ear, double edged with hysteria and over-caffeination.

Alice's voice cut in. "Jasper, just come home. You've been there for two days. There's nothing else you can do there now and it's not safe to linger. We'll find her again."

Edward immediately started arguing with her and I sighed. I couldn't diffuse the situation from here. There, Esme, Carlisle, Alice, and Edward were sharing a phone line in the kitchen while we tried to figure out what needed to happen next. Esme, Carlisle, and Alice were focused on avoiding exposure and information gathering, but Edward. . . Edward was working on losing it.

I'd seen Edward absolutely crack just three times during my life with Alice. Oh, he had a temper that he lost on a regular basis, but there was a difference between his rage storms and the utter breakdowns he was capable of having. They were caused by just one thing: Bella.

The first time had been truly scary. One minute he was a rational scientist who approached life with a certain pragmatic realism. Sure, he was a little moody and a little angsty, but nothing over the top. He'd been turned against his will, as had we all, but he was coping. He and Carlisle had their lab, their plans, and their dreams. They had Alice to look after, which they did with a fierce paternalism, and then they had Bella. Well, Edward had had Bella. She'd fought through all his walls and captivated him completely. He'd fallen hard, even for our kind, and he would have moved heaven and earth one brick at a time to keep her safe, happy, and by his side.

Then Bella went out the window and it was like rational Edward had never existed at all. I shuddered at the memory. He'd been absolutely feral in his hunt for her. The scientist Edward had gone serial, shredding the Volturi's people with his bare hands when he had caught up with them.

And it hadn't done a damn bit of good. Bella had absolutely vanished. It was as if she'd never existed.

Edward had gone numb after a few weeks. We'd been fooled, thinking he was settling down to a cold vengeance. He'd been a madman about rebuilding the lab, really throwing himself into the formulas. Over the next few months, he and Carlisle had their first big breakthroughs on the neutralizing formula since they'd come to America, and they'd started on the attraction serums.

Then Seth's telegram had arrived from Forks.

_She came for him._

Four simple words. Just four words.

Crack number two. Seth had been permanently banned from communications work after that misleading message fiasco. Edward, well, Edward had been in Forks in a matter of hours. It took us months to fish his insane ass out of the woods again.

Housebreaking him again? Years. Fucking _years_.

There had been nothing to do but work around it. Edward was a ball of inhuman misery. Carlisle had once mentioned that the only thing he'd seen Edward take even half as hard was becoming a vampire in the first place. Given the vendetta Edward took to the lab with him on a regular basis, it was saying something.

Time had passed. Years with no news. Edward had calmed. . . or probably just gotten worn out. The lab work was taking a toll, and the experiments he put his body through were frightening as he skirted the edge of sanity. He just didn't care about living in a world where there was no Bella, but outright killing himself wasn't an option. The experimentation let him torture himself in the name of vengeance as he wouldn't give the Volturi the satisfaction of seeing him truly dead—not before he killed them first. Them, and their new weapon. . . an assassin they called the Distiller. A vampire who ate other vampires. Supposedly could smell your heart and sucked the soul right out of you.

Secretive, mysterious, and managed by a third party, no one knew a damn thing about the Distiller. Rumor said they'd recruited the vamp somehow, but Carlisle and Edward suspected that it was a creation of the Volturi's private labs. They'd gotten into the chemical manipulation business late, but the arms race had been fierce. Carlisle and Edward thought the Distiller was just a Volturi test product they didn't want to fully own up to creating since they couldn't fully control it.

Yeah, the Distiller was a lab creation alright—ours.

Not that we'd brightened up to that initially. No, no, no. Decades. . . fucking _decades_. . . of all the wrong kinds of research, the wrong kinds of work, the wrong kinds of weapons development. Edward with his nose to the grindstone day and night, sweating out new formulas, making the breakthrough for the change formula that brought us back the option of humanity.

Game-changer, that one. The Volturi were pissed beyond belief. Edward had doubled down and worked harder. Feeding, bathing, and social interaction were ignored, since all he had time for was the lab.

We got the bright idea of staging an intervention and told Edward to take a vacation. I remembered him sitting at the microscope, jaw dropped, lab coat flopping, eyes huge in his face, protesting.

"What will I do if I'm not working?"

Alice had come up with the brilliant idea that we would make him into a perfume spokesman and playboy. We'd diluted the attraction serums for a human market and wanted to raise capital for more lab work on the change formula. We needed someone suitably attractive to sell it, and we needed Edward to take a break before he snapped. So we proposed to dose him up and send him out into the world of humans to unwind.

He'd accepted it like some kind of death sentence.

Still, he'd lived it up with a certain grim determination. He made a science out of being a dilettante and falling in with the wrong sorts of people. The jet-set party circuit ate him up, the perfume sold like hot cakes, and Edward tolerated it all, barely. We all knew he was just counting down the days of his five year vacation until he could "die" from the high life and we'd let him back in the lab to get on with his anti-social Bella-hunting existence.

Then one day, just off the coast of Amalfi, he walked down to the docks for a boat ride with Laurent. He liked to hang with the vamp, to remember what he really was and to play with fire a little. It was Edward's way of living on the edge during his human years.

So there they were, just two big playboys on their way out for a pleasure cruise.

Until Laurent's friend pulled herself up out of the water and said hello.

You always find things in the last place you look.

Edward had raced to connect the dots in his own head for a Bella who didn't know she was _**his**_ Bella. Instead, she thought she was a super killer.

Okay, so she was a super killer. Minor technicality, right?

We'd always suspected they'd send the Distiller after us, but we hadn't—and Edward especially hadn't—truly been prepared for what that reality might look like, smiling up at him in a barely there bikini and calling herself Tanya.

He'd played his cards close to his chest with us, and it wasn't until the last minute, the night of his big gamble, that Alice had even caught on to what he was doing down there at the villa in Amalfi. He'd begged her to let him go through with it, convinced her that his plan would work, and then. . . well. . . Bella called his bluff.

Crack number three was still being investigated by the Italian police.

Not that the ongoing investigation was entirely Edward's fault. I mean, what can you do when the Volturi—

"Jasper?"

"Sorry Alice, my mind wandered." There was no more background noise on her end, so I could only assume Edward had stormed out of the room, crack number four temporarily avoided.

"Where did it go?"

"1928, Forks, Italy."

Alice sighed. "Why not 1924?"

I smiled into the phone. "I've always preferred 1925."

"But we met in 1924."

"True, but the first time I got you all to myself was in 1925."

She chuckled. "Edward and Carlisle were just a little protective, weren't they?"

I snorted. "Baby, it was like a competition between them. It's a miracle they let me talk to you at all."

"They didn't want to, did they? I hadn't been free very long, and they were just being cautious. They didn't want to let me out of their sight for a second."

"I know." I'd had to practically install myself in their hotel to even catch glimpses of her in those days, since Edward and Carlisle were determined to shut me out. "Still, good things come to those who wait, right?"

She laughed. "Patience was never your strong suit. It was a good thing, too, or Carlisle and Edward would have kept you hanging for years."

"Instead we got the garden."

"Mmmm-mmm," she hummed into the phone. "You smelled better to me than any of those flowers."

I pushed up off the bench and started walking again, letting my mind wander in the memory with her even as my feet took me onto the next block. "You positively glistened in the moonlight. It was all I could do to keep my hands to myself."

She laughed. "You certainly stood close enough, didn't you?"

"The better to breathe you in, my pretty," I said in my best Big Bad Wolf voice, and sniffed loudly for her amusement. While she cackled at my antics, my body froze as it processed the air I'd just inhaled.

_Freesia. Fresh freesia._ I gasped and started sniffing again, frantically trying to source the trail of the one scent that didn't belong in the cityscape.

"Um, Jasper, baby, you can stop sniffing now. You sound ridiculous."

"No more games, Alice. I smelled her. She was just here!"

"What?!" Alice's shriek was nearly supersonic, and I could hear people rushing back into the room on her end.

"I'll call," I said, sniffing furiously, "when I find her, I'll call." Cutting off the questions coming at me through the line, I leaned into wind to find the strongest source of the scent.

A parking meter.

I was aware that people were staring as I tried to follow the scent pattern. I started exuding waves of "Nothing is happening here" vibes at max power so that I could investigate further. Broad daylight was not my friend as I circled and sniffed the pole, no doubt looking absolutely psychotic to the average bystander.

Bella had been at this parking meter. There was no doubt about it. For the smell to be this strong, she must have practically mated with it sometime in the last hour. Unfortunately, I couldn't source any trail to the meter or away from it. She had just dropped from the sky onto this spot and vanished again, according to my nose.

I shook my head. My nose was shit. I needed to engage my brain.

The sniffing wasn't helping. All I could smell were people and all of the people were full of blood. Their heartbeats echoed in my ears and I could hear their blood pumping in their veins. _Delicious. . . _

I shook my head again. _Focus_.

People were everywhere, had been everywhere, were going to be everywhere around this meter. I just had a small window before the scent dissipated, worn away and covered up by human contact.

Warm human contact, brushing its rich aroma over the delicate floral with smooth strokes of that most electric essence, fresh blood. _Mmmmmm_. . .

_Not fucking now!_ I told my stomach, furious. There was a reason I didn't breathe much, and it had everything to do with my appetite. My fucking out of control appetite that was suddenly in hyper-drive, reminding me that it had been a little too long since the last time I'd eaten.

It was a nightmare come true. I needed to track Bella, which meant I needed to sniff her out. But I couldn't sniff her out without catching the scent of every other piece of prey—_shit, person!—_in the city.

It was all I could do not to howl in frustration when my stomach out and out rumbled, my throat aching right along with it. The combination made me want to latch onto the next passing throat and just—

_Think, Jasper, think! _That was it. No more breathing until I got my hunger under control. I needed to use my brain before I went wild. Bella couldn't have just dropped from the sky. She was weak, she was sick, and she wasn't supposed to be able to travel.

I scanned my immediate surroundings. Shops, shops, shops, hotel.

_Hotel._

I practically sprinted for the door of the hotel. It was a straight shot over from the parking meter, and I sniffed the door handles aggressively, ignoring the stare from the doorman.

Nothing.

Inside was no better. People smells were everywhere, but there was absolutely no trace of freesia anywhere. The receptionist was giving me a wary look as I approached the desk, clearly agitated.

"Do you speak English?"

She nodded hesitantly and I smiled. "I'm looking for one of your guests."

She shifted uneasily. "We don't release information about guests of the hotel."

"She's about this tall—" I gestured, "with long dark hair and pale skin. She's very thin, and very sick. Probably can't walk under her own power."

Recognition flickered in her eyes, but she pressed her lips together. "We don't release information about guests of the hotel."

I put all my powers on her. _Tell me what you know_, I willed, and she seemed to sway under the influence. Her mouth opened and I leaned forward, hanging on her every word.

"We don't release information about guests of the hotel. Please leave," she whispered, her voice strained and wobbling as her body shook with the stress of resistance.

I slammed my fist into the reception desk, shattering the counter. "Tell me," I growled, but she just screamed.

Hands clapped onto me from behind and I whirled around, snarling. The security team stepped back, one of them dropping a hand none too subtly to his hip. He said something to me in Russian, but I wasn't listening.

Over his shoulder I'd spotted the main bank of elevators. Suddenly I knew what I had to do to get my answers. Screw the question and answer session. A couple was just stepping out, providing the ideal window of opportunity. Vaulting the goon squad, I launched myself into the elevator just as the doors were closing and pressed the button for the top floor.

I started breathing deeply in the elevator, hoping for a sign that Bella had been here. There was nothing, but that didn't dissuade me. The second the doors opened, I sprinted free, scenting up and down the hall rapidly before sprinting down the stairs to the level below.

Three levels in, I hit pay dirt.

Sort of.

The maid screamed when I burst into Room 418, slamming the door back into the wall as I huffed in the smell of Bella. She'd definitely been here, and no amount of cleaning solution could cover that up.

The fire in the trashcan, however, had definitely covered something up.

"What burned?" I said, pointing. The maid just screamed again. I pushed calm at her, but she was over the edge. Moving to close the door, I realized the handle was embedded in the wall.

_Shit_, s_o much for passing as human._ I leaned in toward the door to pull it loose and was assaulted by another scent I recognized.

_Emmett. _My brain swam and started racing down memory lane as I struggled to figure out how to tie my past to Bella's watch to this scent here, now.

There was a click from the hallway, and I looked up from the door handle into a black mass. Raising my eyes further, I recognized the leader of the goon squad, with a mean Russian piece leveled directly at me.

He whispered into his earpiece and made a hands-up gesture with his gun. I ignored him and did the only logical thing I could think of with him standing right in front of me, blocking my path.

I pulled a Bella and took the window exit.

Landing in a flurry of glass on the sidewalk, the maid's screams weren't the only ones echoing in my ears as I straightened up. I started sprinting up the block, dodging traffic as I crossed the street and kept running.

Finally I spotted a narrow alleyway and threw myself into it, scrabbling at the walls until I hit the rooftops. There was safety in the sky, because humans rarely looked up.

I punched the button to call Alice.

"Jasper, what the hell?"

I cringed. She couldn't know already. "I'm sorry, I just snapped. I knew she was in the hotel!"

There was a pause. Evidently I was back on speaker line status, because Esme spoke. "Start at the beginning."

"I was talking to Alice and I smelled her on the parking meter in front of the Hotel Moskva. She was staying in Room 418, but she's checked out now."

Alice interrupted in her security queen tone. "Now the rest of it, starting with 'I just snapped' and including all the damage."

I sighed. How to explain that I'd lost my composure without getting myself in more shit? The third degree on this mess was going to be brutal, especially since I needed to leave a few parts out. "Um, I smelled her outside and took a chance that she had been in the hotel. The receptionist knew something but didn't want to tell me and I kind of, um, tried to vamp her, but it didn't work so I, um, smashed, um—"

Edward spoke, cutting off a trailing explanation that had the eloquence of a six-year-old with his hand still in the cookie jar. Despite his earlier raging, he sounded surprisingly calm now, opting to skip the drama portion of the conversation in favor of the Bella portion. "Can she still be tracked?"

"No. It was an isolated scent spot and she's definitely left the hotel. The maid was cleaning the room when I came in."

There was a moment of silence. Edward spoke again. "Can you go back to the hotel?"

"Um, no."

"Did you eat anyone?"

"No!" I was indignant, but it wasn't like it would have been the first time. _I __knew__ I should have gone hunting this morning._

There was another pause with total quiet, which was unnerving, and then a flurry of sound as they took me off mute. _Bastards and their secret conferences. . . _

Edward asked one more question on behalf of the judges. "Are we going to see you on the news?"

I groaned. "God, I hope not."

There were sighs all around before Alice delivered the verdict. "Come home, Jasper."

"Okay," I said in a deflated tone, feeling their disappointment. So much for laying low and scouting out Bella's new location quietly. I hung up and slowly climbed back down the building to hail a cab.

On my way to the airport, I rolled Bella's pocket watch between my fingers. I'd taken the photo of her with Rose and Emmett out because I didn't know how to explain it, just as I didn't know how to explain why I'd gone so crazy in the hotel without bringing up Emmett's scent. Except I couldn't bring up knowing Emmett without having to explain life with Maria, and if Alice found out about that whole situation. . . or if Carlisle found out. . . or Edward. . . _fucking hell_.

I facepalmed with a crack that made my taxi driver jump. Why did I have to lie in the first place? At the time it had seemed so important to keep it all a secret, but now. . . now I knew better. It was messy, but I could have fixed it. Now it just looked worse since I'd been hiding it for nearly a hundred years.

I growled at the situation and the taxi driver punched the gas, his heart rate revving up faster than the engine. _What a mess,_ I thought. _What a fucking mess._

This could have all been avoided if I'd just tracked Bella properly. She'd been right there, and I'd missed her by an hour or two, tops. Then I had to go and blow my human cover, which was why I was being ordered out of the field.

I scrubbed my face with my hands and growled again, shifting across the back seat. The driver's eyes watched my frustrated and fidgety movements nervously and I chuckled darkly. Edward's twitchy ways were suddenly making a lot more sense to me, and as the cab pulled up to the curb it hit me that being cooped up in the plane for the next 13 hours was going to be absolute hell on my fucking nerves.

Sure enough, it was a long plane ride home.

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**Reviewers have all my love and loyalty and I welcome the questions from all my Team WTFIGO? supporters. Hope this helped. What else needs answered, other than everything?**

**Reviews, comments, alerts, favorites--Ch 9 teasers await you. After all, Jasper's not the only one having a long plane ride home at the moment. Poor Ben. He was expecting to sleep on the plane, not to be locked in the bathroom! **


	10. Chapter 9: Trouble in the Air

**Disclaimer: SMeyer owns the originals.**

**Thanks: To my pre-reader, furiouskitten, my lovely betas ElleCC and B-Rizzle-Dizzle, and to each of you, for continuing to read.**

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**~: Chapter 9: Trouble in the Air :~**

_30,000 feet above sea level, Ben's POV:_

It was a long plane ride home.

Ben stared at the closed door of the bathroom. From his perch on the toilet seat, he had four visual choices. He could stare at his feet, his brown shitkickers freshly scuffed from his mad dash across the tarmac and into the plane. He could stare to the left, wishing his mind could be as blank as that wall instead of racing with nasty possibilities. He could stare to his right, letting his own sleep-deprived eyes stare back at him from the mirror, the dark bags building up under each one almost matching the rising bruises on the side of his face from Emmett's help with his unexpected journey into the bathroom itself.

Or he could stare straight ahead at the door, locked tight. The smooth panels were marred in just one place, a bulging indentation reaching in at him. Rather than a simple knock in the metal, this indentation was precisely shaped.

Three fingers, starkly outlined, pressing into the metal and almost making it through before being snatched away.

_Aunt Tanya._

One minute she'd been helpless, hanging onto him like he was the last life preserver on the Titanic. He'd tried to keep her talking, but her replies had gotten more and more garbled as her consciousness faded. By the time the taxi had pulled up next to Emmett's private plane, Ben had a flopping, lifeless doll to deal with in the backseat.

A doll with a temperature of well over a hundred degrees and rising. Even as he pulled her out of the cab, she seemed to be heating up. He'd thrown all the money he had at the driver, draped her over his shoulder, and raced for the plane where Emmett waited, concern etched onto his features.

"What's going on?" Emmett had shouted, stepping out of the shadows of the cabin door and starting down the stairs. Ben, tripping, had flung his aunt forward by way of explanation, the heat of her skin starting to raise steam in the cool Russian air.

Emmett had plucked Aunt Tanya out of mid-air and deftly maneuvered her through the cabin door without any of her limbs connecting with the plane's unyielding exterior. Ben had used the side of the plane to haul himself up, panting his way into the nearest seat. Emmett had laid Aunt Tanya on the floor, where she looked like a peaceful dreamer, her face showing no trace of the alarm Ben knew etched his features.

The only sign something was wrong was the steam that rose gently from the floor. A few quick words in Russian from Emmett and the stewardess disembarked, her heels clicking down the stairs briskly as she made her escape. With one massive yank, Emmett had pulled the cabin door shut after her. Ben had eyed the display of strength with alarm, but the pilot had simply nodded, locked the cockpit door, and gotten them airborne.

Ben had watched Aunt Tanya in silence from his seat at the head of the aisle, eyes darting between his aunt, who was disturbing, and Emmett, who was clearly disturbed. It was the second most frightening sight of his life to see a full-fledged vampire having a full-fledged freak out at 30,000 feet.

The most frightening moment of his life happened about five minutes later, when Aunt Tanya abruptly stopped steaming. Her skin cooled so fast Ben could see moisture start to condense around her.

Then she opened her eyes.

Her bright, red eyes.

Ben barely had time to register the movement before Emmett was arched between them, holding her back. "No! He is one of our people!"

One thin, elegant hand had simply reached for him, stretching around Emmett's ribs to grab at him as a voice he'd be hearing in his nightmares softly enunciated his name, "Benjamin. . . "

Ben shook his head to clear the vision and gingerly fingered the side of his face. Emmett had acted fast, but almost not fast enough. The door in front of him probably only represented a symbolic barrier, reinforced not by steel but by Emmett's headlock on Aunt Tanya. Ben therefore eyed it warily, ears straining for sound, but there was nothing now.

There had been a series of plane-shaking thumps just after his incarceration. Then an ominous silence had prevailed, stretching out, on and on and on and playing on Ben's last nerve like a dark symphony. In his mind, bright red eyes stared at him from just beyond the other side of the door. Waiting . . .

. . . waiting . . .

. . . wait—

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**Chapter 10 up tomorrow!**


	11. Chaos on the Ground

**SMeyer has the originals. . . I just have their coffee.**

**Thanks to furious kitten, ElleCC, and B-Rizzle-Dizzle for beta support, and to everyone for reading and reviewing!**

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**~ Chapter 10: Chaos On The Ground ~**

_Chicago, Alice's POV  
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"Wait!" shouted Edward, launching himself out of his furious pacing loop and into the kitchen.

"No," I said firmly, unscrewing another piece. "This has to be done."

"Not about that," Edward said with exasperation from behind me. "Jasper."

"Jasper will be home in"—I checked my watch—"eight hours, give or take. You can give him the earful he deserves then."

"Alice! Listen to what I'm saying here!"

"Edward! You haven't said anything yet!" I wheeled and shook my piece of the espresso machine at him. "Until you have something useful to contribute to the world of conversation, you can take your over-caffeinated ass back to the living room."

Edward glared at me. I was strung out with worry over Jasper, and he was just plain strung out. I could hear his heart racing at an inhuman speed from across the room, aided by his raging emotions and double shots of espresso. The glint in his eyes, however, wasn't a wild one. He had a purpose behind this tirade other than halting my dismantling of his coffee set up.

I sighed and slumped back against the counter. "What?"

"We caught Bella on camera at the crime scene, right?"

"Obviously."

"Jasper smelled her in front of the hotel, right?"

"Again, obviously."

He grinned triumphantly. I just looked at him blankly. "Edward, that trail of logic doesn't make a point." I was beginning to wish I'd been allowed to go with Carlisle and Esme down to the lab. Unfortunately, Mr. Nonsense-Spouter needed a minder to ensure he put something in his body besides premium gourmet coffee and leftover birthday cake, and I'd drawn the short straw.

He remained triumphant as he continued, refusing to be nonplussed by my uninspired reaction. "Cameras, dear Alice. My point is cameras. Get Jasper to tell us the name of the hotel again and then you can hack their cameras and we can find Bella."

I nearly face-palmed myself for not thinking of it sooner, stopping when I realized I still had an espresso spout in my hand. Running over to my computer, I powered it up while pounding out a message to Jasper on my phone. I remembered the name of the property, but I needed one other detail. _Were there cameras at the hotel?_

Behind me, I heard the tell-tale clink of pot to cup. Whirling around I shouted, "Edward! Put that coffee down _now_. You've had enough." He backed away from the counter, clutching both pot and cup to his chest as I advanced. "You can't abuse your human body just because your vampire substructure lets you. Give me that coffee." He shook his head and pulled his precious liquids up tighter into his chest, not fully processing that he'd backed himself into a corner.

My phone dinged, signaling a reply from Jasper. I made no move to answer it. "Hand over the pot, Edward, and no one gets hurt."

"One cup."

"Sandwich first." He glared at me, but I had other things to do – like hack some camera systems ASAP – so I did a little lightning snatch and sprinted for the sink. His earlier evil eye was nothing compared to the look I got as I firmly poured both pot and cup down the sink.

"You're a bitch, Alice."

"I'm your sister, Edward. Sandwich."

He grumbled his way over to the refrigerator, muttering about adoption not counting and cruel and unusual punishment while I whipped out my phone. _In the elevators, I think._ I pinged the website. Security video control system? Why yes, yes we do have that. I chuckled evilly . . . this was going to be fun.

Famous. Last. Words.

Fucking Russians had fucking good security at that hotel. I actually had to send Edward to the lab to get Esme to help me hack them out. Carlisle pointed out, hours in, that it would have probably been easier and more useful to hack the city's traffic cams to get the taxi plates than messed with a hotel system, and both of us gave him dark looks over the tops of our computers.

Edward had learned his lesson for the day and simply made sure I could see him eating his sandwiches. He was building them up like Dagwood Bumstead, creating towering masterpieces that took him nearly half an hour to assemble, and then methodically putting them away with no apparent enjoyment.

He was washing them down with water and pouting like a five-year-old. A smart five year old, because he hadn't said one word to me about not getting a cup of coffee per sandwich. The critical gears were firmly in my pocket, and I was busy. Instead, his glowering silence spoke volumes about the injustice in the world.

Jasper got home and discovered us all gathered in the dining room. Esme and I were next to each other, hacking our hearts out. Edward sat at the end of the table, eating and glowering. Carlisle hovered and paced, offering Ed unwanted nutritional advice and waiting, like the rest of us, for a breakthrough.

"No luck?" asked Jasper, earning himself a full set of cold stares. "Guess not," he said, taking a seat next to Edward and sliding out the gun and canister of darts.

Edward snatched them up and whipped open the canister, shaking out the darts into his palm.

"Careful with those!" Carlisle was by his side in an instant. "Mixed dosages have bad reactions."

"I'm aware," said Edward coldly, his voice stiff from hours of disuse. He disregarded his own green darts and focused in on the fourth, twirling it between his fingers and holding it up to the light. Carlisle hovered nervously.

"You don't know what that is or where it has been, Edward. Be careful."

"The tip looks clean. Your opinion, doctor?" He passed the dart over to Carlisle, who took it as though it were a loaded nuclear bomb. Ever since he and Esme had joined forces, he'd gotten a lot more careful about his chemical adventures. It was kind of cute to see my fearless father figure gingerly protecting his quasi-immortal ass on her behalf, but he wasn't going to let himself be shown up by a human, either. Especially not when that human was Edward. They respected each other as scientists, but there was no denying that they could push each other as men.

"I don't see visible residue, but we should still run it through the lab for traces. Definitely not one of our formulations, either."

Edward nodded. "It should be a good insight into what the Volturi are developing. Jasper, did Laurent give any indications as to when James took this from their labs?"

Jasper shook his head. Esme looked up from her screen at him. "It would have been nice to have been able to ask Laurent directly, Jasper." Her eyes dropped back to her screen, but the reproach was nevertheless a stinging one.

Jasper's eyes flicked over to me. I shook my head. No sympathy in this corner. "He's not answering his phone. Not even Victoria has heard from him. You were the last person to see him."

He gave a sigh and buried his head in his hands for a moment. When he pulled himself up, he had a resigned look on his face. "I have to go hunt. If I wait, I might try to eat Ed."

Edward grimaced at both the nickname and sentiment. "I'm under-caffeinated, Jasper. I'll taste like shit."

"Oh, for the love of all that's holy. Fine. Fine. You want to kill yourself by drinking three pots of double roast a day, fine. Be my guest." I started winging pieces of the espresso machine at him from across the table, aiming directly for his head.

He ducked and left Jasper to pick the pieces out of the air before they went through the windows. "Jesus, Alice. You're getting as bad as he is."

"It's this fucking system! I can't break into it and the traffic system is giving Esme fits and the whole thing is a mess and nothing is in English." I could feel Jasper shifting to send calm my way, and I didn't appreciate it. "Do not calm me down, Jasper Whitlock. I want to be upset about this right now."

He came over to me, hands full of parts, and kissed my ranting forehead. "Relax, babe. You'll figure it out. Ever since I showed you computers, there hasn't been one to beat you." His words did nothing to calm me down, so I just huffed and watched him lead Mr. Coffee to his holy land and gift him back the parts before heading out to hunt. Or more likely, down to the clinic to snitch a real snack. I knew my man through and through, and even fresh deer was not going to be cutting it for him right now.

Esme kept typing, and Carlisle wandered over to watch. He couldn't help but lean in to give advice, and I could see her brow furrow in slight annoyance. Then he whispered something else in her ear and she smiled while I rolled my eyes. Young lovers they might not be, but they were still gut-wrenchingly adorable when they weren't being 100% business.

I banged on the keyboard in pure frustration and earned myself a loud beep, followed by the angry whir of the processor. _Great,_ I thought, _just great. Now I've busted the damn thing._

Program windows started to open and close as some system process executed. I huffed into my bangs and threw myself back in my chair to watch the destruction unfold. Just my luck to get right into the heart of a program and then lose my cool and ruin all my hard work.

And then, miracle of miracles, a video system opened. Just like that, I was in. I nearly fell out of my chair in shock before setting my fingers gently back on the rows of my poor, abused keyboard. "Esme, I need some help with the translating." The commands were still all in Russian, and she was picking it up faster than I was.

In the background, I could hear Ed snapping in the final pieces of his precious espresso machine. In front of me, however, I could see the corridors of the hotel, full of people bustling around. Workmen were walking a new slab of granite into the lobby area, no doubt doing some kind of remodeling.

Esme watched for a moment, then typed a set of characters. Nothing happened. She frowned and repeated her command, then tried another. "I think it is limited to a real time feed."

"No rewind?"

She shook her head. "Not responding."

Edward came in and stood behind us briefly, watching. Did he imagine her in those halls? His breathing and heart rate gave away nothing.

I turned back to Esme. "Any luck on the traffic cams?"

"I have the suburbs and the airport freeway, but I'm still working on the downtown cams." She went back to her computer and typed a few more lines of code. Since Carlisle's suggestion, she'd taken point on the traffic system and made much faster progress than I had with the hotel's cameras.

Edward and I watched her as she pecked and peered at St. Petersburg's system. Distracted briefly by his caffeine craving, he wandered back into the kitchen and twisted a few knobs. Naturally, this meant that he missed the big moment.

"There they are!" I yelled, pointing to the screen. "It's definitely Bella."

Advancing the frames, it became clear that the camera wasn't a continuous stream. Instead, the images moved like jerky flipbook cartoons, appearing on the sidewalk and stepping to the curb. Captured from the side, Bella's face was agonized as she clung to the shirt of the man carrying her.

"Who's that?" I asked Esme as she paused the frame on a clear shot of Bella hanging on the meter while her new friend stepped out into traffic.

"I'm not sure," she muttered zooming in. "Looks like human, but big. Check out the muscles on those arms!"

We both stared as she zoomed back out and advanced the frames again. There was Bella, swept up by her unknown savior with one rippling arm and cradled tightly against his chest while they stepped out into traffic . . . and right in front of the plate numbers we needed. "Damn, damn, damn," I muttered. "What are the odds?"

Esme nodded. She zoomed around a couple different frames, but between the knees of Mr. Mysterious and the St. Petersburg traffic there wasn't anything useful. Finally she just left it on the shot of the two of them in street, Bella's eyes closed as she lay against a chest that was impressive even in low resolution black-and-white. Flicking the screen gently, Esme commented, "In a city full of strangers, only Bella could find a friend like that."

"Mmmm-hmmm," I agreed. "But they look like a lot more than friends."

Fired up behind me, both Edward and his espresso machine gave a low, menacing hiss.

* * *

**Teasers available now; Chapter 11 available someday (soon, I hope!)**


	12. Chapter 11: Paths Into The Woods

**Thanks to PTB for their edits and all of you for reading … and SMeyer for the originals.**

* * *

_**Chapter 11: Paths Into The Woods**_

_**~~/~~**_

_Canada, 1931, BPOV_

A low, menacing hiss burst out of me when I slipped on the ice. Again.

It was a bitterly cold night, even for Canada. Even for me – and I didn't have a body temperature to maintain.

What I did have was an appetite. My hunger was almost out of control, and my situation was not good. I'd been greedy at the last logging camp, taking advantage of a bad storm that had trapped several humans inside overnight at the little bar where I was working.

At first, I'd been determined not to eat them. The woods were full of more monsters than just me, and I was tired of being on the run. All I wanted was a little place to be safe for a while, a little place where no one asked questions of a woman traveling alone because they were lonely for a bit of pretty around the camp.

The two men who'd followed me outside when I went to check on the horses didn't realize I was actually snacking on the horses to stay sane. Or that I'd snack on them for what they had planned to do to me.

They hadn't tasted of evil, just lust and liquor with no hint of moderating intelligence. The barkeep proved to have a sterling sense of self-preservation, locking himself in his room when I came back to the house covered in blood. I could have just left, but by then I was angry, so I ate him, too. It was my way, and one more place I couldn't go back to now.

This new town was different. On the surface, it was just another logging camp, full of trappers and traders and transient workers. Underneath there was a more permanent fixture, a small bar at the edge of town that never seemed to close run by a couple that never seemed to change.

The man was the biggest man I'd ever seen, built like a giant blond grizzly bear. He must have been a soldier once. He carried himself with a military precision and watched the world with calculating eyes, constantly figuring the odds. He was always on guard, always ready to defend.

What needed defending, what he treasured the most, was obvious to even the most casual observer. His woman was also blond, but almost frighteningly pretty. She had a hard front, as every bar woman must, but every stray creature for miles around gathered at her back door for a nightly feast of scraps.

She fed four-legged strays outside, and two-legged strays inside. Children of all ages meekly accepted small snacks and cookies until they were full enough to burst. You could tell they were scared of her and the big man, but a hungry belly can find a soft heart. Even in the most unlikely places. And especially when those soft hearts were constantly looking out for anyone who might be hungry.

"You thin. Go, around the back. My Rose has food," the big man would say. He'd push the shy ones and bully the brave ones. His eye could spot a missed meal under layers of winter clothes, and he was adept at picking out the hungry ones, the bullied ones, the neglected ones.

It wasn't charity that lit the eyes of his Rose as she fed everything in sight. Maternal fierceness was in every line of her body. Life being what it is, they had no children of their own, and they seemed to be open to adopting everything in sight.

Still, I was no child. Their bar was busy, but not so busy they couldn't handle it themselves, even though they never seemed to sleep. I thought they might be like me, but then again, there didn't seem to be anything else like me in the world. Maybe it would be better to stay away … and yet I'd been hanging around for weeks, watching them and plotting a way to break into their lives.

Tonight, though, I struggled to stay away out in the cold. I had been watching for a long time, and I knew the routine. On freezing nights like this, Rose would have food at the back door for all her forest friends – half-tame food that ate out of her hand and then stumbled lethargically back into the forest and my own waiting arms. I just had to wait.

_I hate waiting._

I fidgeted in the cold, needing something to take the edge off. The hunger inside threatened to take over at any second if it didn't get what it wanted _now._ And I couldn't afford a mistake – not if I was really trying to make friends. Or at least not make any enemies.

Reluctantly, I abandoned my post and slipped away for a quick hunt before the big feast I anticipated later.

I gave in to my hunger and my mind was on fresh meat when I came over the hill and heard the sob. It was late, full dark. The road I needed to travel to hunt was to my left, but the cries were to my right…

I paused, listened, and sniffed the air. Blood.

My mind went away and I was in the trees before I knew it. I tracked the blood at lightning speed, my hunger giving me momentum. But I came to a sharp halt when I found the source of the world's most intoxicating smell…

It was a boy.

He was half-frozen, sniffling, and beaten all to hell. He had run barefoot into the woods, and his bloody footprints marked the path I had retraced from the tree tops. Now he huddled against an icy trunk, sobbing, with no proper coat to cover him against the cold.

I tsk-tsk'd the whole situation out loud. He heard the familiar human sound and looked in my direction, not seeing me in my tree-top perch. His eyes tried to focus in the dark, scouring the shadows for the source of the noise.

"Please help me. Please. Somebody be there to help me." He stared off into the darkness for another long moment, listening, and then shivered violently as the chill of the snow all around us took hold again. The shiver hurt, and he whimpered softly as he slumped back against the tree trunk, "Please, somebody help."

I was insane. Completely insane. I'd eaten the last three humans I'd met for snacks. Admittedly, they hadn't been nice people, but my hunger didn't exactly discriminate. I needed to eat more than I needed to play rescuer.

He was just a boy.

I was a total monster.

He was just a boy...

He plastered himself back against the frozen bark of the tree when I dropped out of the branches to stand in front of him, a mass of stolen furs and wild hair. His breath stabbed out in short, icy spears from his open mouth, and I could see the tears freezing in his eyelashes as he stared through bruised lids at my otherworldly arrival. His eyes would have popped out of their sockets, had one not been black and the other nearly swollen shut.

It was clearly not his first beating, but it was going to be his last.

"Who are you?" he asked. His voice trembled, the sound echoing off the snowdrifts.

Who was I indeed? My plan hadn't included introductions. My plan ... well, I didn't really have one. I was nothing but dark instinct, the stuff of nightmares walking.

His bare feet bled into the snow. Silently, I watched the seeping red, hunger raging inside me, mouth watering – and then another set of instincts took over.

"I am ... Help Requested." My voice sounded alien to my own ears, too sharp, too strong, and too unnatural. I tried to soften my tone. "You asked for help?"

He nodded tentatively, tears threatening again, heart racing like the wind over snow. Bruised, battered, and terrified, I could sense his system crumbling as cold, shock, and blood loss combined to overwhelm his will to live.

There was no time. "Trust me, and you will be fine." I swooped my ragged bear coat over his shoulders and swaddled him in an instant, knowing our journey would be swift and cold.

For where do you take the bloodied children of men, if not to other vampires?

~:~:~:~

Her herd of deer scattered like leaves when we flew into the yard behind the bar. I stopped opposite the back door, just inside the tree line.

"You feed stray things," I said, announcing the obvious by way of introduction. Corn dropped from her outstretched palm while she carefully considered my statement.

"What do you find so straying?" she asked, sniffing the air. The foreign lilt to her tone was buried under a pitter-pat of corn hitting the doorstep as her nostrils widened and she dropped her apron. The birds would make short work of that little golden mountain later, when two creatures of the night weren't negotiating for a child of the day.

There should be three creatures here, but this was no time to fuss over details. The child was bleeding.

"I have a boy."

"Whose boy?"

"Your boy, if you feed and protect him."

"Where?" boomed a voice from behind me, as the bear-man of the house dropped down from the trees. "I smell blood."

I turned so I could see them both. She was framed by light, her fierce beauty profiled in the door of the house. He stood in shadow, one with the trees. I was pinned between the two, arms full of an item of unknown provenance. They couldn't see the boy wrapped up under my coat, though all of us could clearly smell what he represented. I'd swaddled him up and run, his face buried against a chest that no doubt felt as icy as the tree he'd been huddled against before I'd found him. Leaping through trees and over rocks, I hadn't really thought through my decision. It was just the only thing to do.

She had to take him in; I could not. I didn't have a home, just the trees and the dark nights where death was mere seconds behind my smile. A child had no place with me.

"He is here," I said, nodding toward my arms. The bear-man moved toward me and I pulled the boy closer and growled. The sound was black and rich with violent promise. _Calculate these odds, soldier, _I thought. He raised both hands in a blended peace-making and now-what gesture.

With slow, deliberate steps, I approached the house, keeping the bear-man in sight. When it was near enough to be an easy catch, I gently tossed my precious cargo into the woman's shocked arms.

It was lunacy on a grand scale. I didn't know these creatures and only assumed they were vampires from watching them. Watching them pass themselves off as humans, seeing them eating nothing but animals. They had the discipline to care for him; she would be able to care for him.

I could think of no safer place for him, in fact, than locked firmly in the circle of her arms. Which made it just a matter of formalities.

"You will see to his wounds?"

She raised one insulted eyebrow at my question, already fussing through the folds of my old bear coat. "Yes."

"You will protect him from further harm?"

Her face took on a determined look. "Yes."

"You will take him as your people?"

A deep voice behind me spoke. The bear-man was back in the shadows, watching us both, affirming, "Always."

I nodded, turned, and ran for the trees. With the boy safe and the niceties out of the way, retribution was in the cards.

Behind me, I could hear the bear-man start to give chase. He was fast, but I was faster and could have easily left him behind. Still, there was a story to be told in blood, and I wanted to make it clear this had not been my doing. I ran back to the place where I'd found the boy and made a slow circle, sniffing the air.

The bear-man arrived in a rush, scattering snow as he thumped down across from where I leaned against a tree trunk.

"So," he said in his thick accent, hands on his hips, giving me a once over.

"So," I replied, not liking what I saw reflected in his eyes. A slim woman, not much more than a girl, with matted brown hair whipping in the wind. Black eyes that gleamed in a pale face with sharp teeth. Dirty clothes, stolen from past meals who wouldn't miss them. My stovepipe jeans were missing their knees and my faded flannel shirt was far too big. An hour ago, I hadn't cared, but the boy had changed things. I wanted this man to like me, to know I meant no harm.

At least no harm to him.

"I am going to hunt this," I said, gesturing to the bloody footprints, "and then I will eat it. It is a bad thing."

"It is a people thing," he said. "We do not hunt people here."

"It is bad," I replied.

He nodded, eying the tracks. "It is bad."

Several slow minutes went by, or maybe an hour. We were statues in the wood, each in our own thoughts. Mine ran to blood, naturally.

"I am Emmett," he said, breaking the stillness.

I didn't say anything.

"We are here to be good people," he continued. "To make like we're humans and have a life."

I didn't say anything.

He didn't say anything.

An owl hooted in the distance.

"It is bad," I said again, pointing to the blood frozen in the snow. "I will hunt this, and stop it from happening again."

Emmett considered this, considered me. "Why?"

I just looked at him.

"Not why for humans. Why for you?"

"It is ... bad." Questions of morality and rationality were a bit foreign to my current existence, and before this my life had been ... nothing I could remember. So this was my life, a hunter of men and an eater of flesh in the woods, and I was struggling to make basic conversation, much less deep philosophical chit-chat.

Why was not a question I had ever answered – not why I hunted men, why I ate them, or why I was so worked up about this particular case.

Mealtime conversation is a little awkward when it's clear what's on the menu, and when I feasted on animals they didn't talk much either. So I'd had precious little opportunity for reflection on my actions over time, or how they were different from my actions tonight. I thought for a while, unusual thoughts, less wild and more civilized than I could ever remember. "To kill it is ... making it right. It is … a fair retribution."

"And the child?"

I growled at him. "The child is safe now. The child must stay safe. You are the safest thing here, because nothing can beat you."

He looked at me like I'd lost my mind, so I continued. "What? I have watched you. Watched her. You are strong, watchful, cautious. You would fight. You would protect him."

He nodded and appeared to think. "We play like people here. Like a family."

"Yes. Like a family. It is a good thing for the boy, for you to play a human family," I said, watching him and watching the light changing in the trees. The moon was coming up, illuminating the path the boy had made through the trees. The path I needed to take soon.

The man watched me. Thought. Watched me some more. Only when I started to move toward the path did he speak.

"It would be a good thing for the boy. It would be a good thing for us. But you … what will you do?"

I shrugged. "Let me fix this first."

"Hmmm," he said. "You fix one problem but leave another. What will happen to the boy?"

"You have him. Play human for him," I said impatiently.

"You can play this game, too. Do you accept this?"

"I will kill this first," I said, gesturing at the bloody footprints on the ground, leading away from us into the woods. I was nothing if not single-minded.

"To make it safe, yes. And then you will come and protect the boy?"

"Of course!" I snapped, not realizing until later that I'd walked into a verbal trap that was going to put an end to my wood-wandering days.

"Good," he said, turning away. "You will be back at the house when this is finished. And clean up – we are nice people here. No messes."

As he left, I went for the trees, tracking down the violent, drunken father of the boy I now thought of as mine.

He was sleeping peacefully when I returned to their doorstep, blood in my teeth and charred ash on my fingertips.

Rose took one look and immediately started boiling more water. As she scrubbed, we talked and planned, coming to an uneasy alliance between strangers.

No messes remained for our boy – our Ben – when he awoke, only three skittish vampires wondering how to make a normal life for a child. A child who knew from the start that he had no family save this family – a mama bear, a papa bear, and a freshly cleaned-up, barely civilized monster of an aunt. He'd eyed us warily when he'd come to, suspicious that it was only a matter of time before we ate him alive.

~:~:~:~

_Canada, present day_

The look in Ben's eyes that day must have been passed straight down to his grandson. Seeing it again took me right back to the original moment we'd started the family, but this time I had a lot more apologizing to do.

"I am so, so sorry I tried to eat you in the plane."

Ben Cheney the Third just kept staring at me, exhaustion and stress overwhelming his system and keeping him from really processing what I was saying. I tried again in French and Russian, adding flourishes until his grandfather hit me with his cane.

"Ow!" Our original Ben might look a bit wizened and weak, but he wielded his cane like a caveman with a club.

"If you can't tell the boy's in shock, you're not that bright," he muttered. "Give him a minute."

The Ben in the bed groaned. "This is all real, isn't it."

We both nodded.

"I'd been hoping it was all a bad dream."

"Hey, don't talk that way about family," his grandfather said. "This family is a good thing."

"She tried to eat me!"

"I've heard about that and you weren't in any real danger anyway. Emmett was there and besides, it's a rule: Family is not food."

The Ben in the bed shook his head. "It is so fucked up that we even have that rule."

"Watch your mouth. And that's not the only rule."

"How many are there?"

"Three," I answered. Three big ones, anyway.

Ben in the bed sighed. "Spit it out – although seriously, when were you planning to tell me about all of this?"

His grandfather glared at him. "Been telling you for years, boy. You just don't listen. More muscles than brains. First rule you know – family is not food. That's more for them than for us, keeps us safe. Second rule is for us – don't speak of what you see. Keeps them safe. And the third rule is for all of us – stick together. Which we do, thick and thin, even if some of us like to run off for decades at a time."

That last jab was decidedly directed at me. I'd been away from the family for a long time, and this wasn't exactly how I'd planned my homecoming.

Emmett had pinned me down in the plane and held me until my newborn nature had worn off. By that time, Ben had passed out in the bathroom from stress and exhaustion, falling into a sleep so deep that when Rose and our original Ben had spotted us carrying him out of the plane, they'd thought I'd killed him.

They'd nearly killed me until Emmett got things sorted out. And then things were normal for about five minutes, until I'd phased back over into human.

Which I was almost getting used to being. Almost.

"I'm going to grab some food from the kitchen. Do you want anything?" The Bens shook their heads in unison, clearly having much to discuss between them, so I headed out to find Rose.

Rose … another situation that was far from normal. Rose, who guarded the whole family she'd created under broad and viciously maternal wings, was not herself.

She was breaking every vampire rule I knew, and quite a few I was sure didn't exist yet because no one had ever tried what she was doing.

It's always been something of a given that vampires are vampires, once done and forever. Admittedly, I was now experiencing first-hand how absolutely bullshit that could be, but everyone knows basically how it's supposed to go.

Vampires get made and then stay made. No growing, no changing. No nothing from now until the world crumbles. Living statues with skins of cold stone, vampires walk among humans, but can't be truly one of them.

Rose was trying. _On purpose_. She'd taken the shots on purpose, so she could be human.

So she could change.

So she could grow.

Her full, rounded belly was messing with nature on a cosmic scale, its fragile passenger on a journey with a decidedly uncertain outcome.

Emmett guarded her like a hawk when he wasn't guarding me. I was a problem, that was for sure. I was a risk. Admittedly, the whole thing was a massive risk, but I was an added, unwanted, and unstable complication, dropping out of nowhere back into their lives.

Which I hadn't been planning to do, ever again. No matter how good we all were together. I was a threat to them for as long as I breathed.

Except I couldn't seem to stop breathing. Huffing, actually. The small walk from Ben's bedroom to the kitchen was really taking it out of my pansy human ass.

Rose heard me coming long before I arrived. She stayed sitting in the kitchen, deliberately finishing a plate of snacks when I walked in, my brain as full as my stomach was empty.

"Hungry?" she asked, starting to get up and fetch something.

"Yes," I said. "I'll take whatever you're eating."

Rose nodded and started assembling leftovers. "How are you feeling?"

"I'm okay. Okay enough for now, anyway."

Rose wagged a finger at me. "You need to see a doctor," she said, the personification of every bossy mom stereotype ever made. Then again, she'd read everything ever written on motherhood over the years, determined not to let our monster sides ruin the good impression we wanted to make on our adopted family. Nevertheless, I didn't particularly want to be mothered right now, especially since I wasn't planning to stay on as one of her human babies.

"It's temporary. It will wear off. Everyone says so. Besides, I don't want to see a doctor. They taste funny when you eat them."

Rose cast a baleful eye my way, not so easily dissuaded. "Don't brush this off as nothing, something you can will away. It's serious stuff. You've always been a little different, so there's no telling what these chemicals are doing to you. You need to get some professional help."

I bristled. "I just need a few days and then I'll go. You'll be safer."

She snorted. "Emmett is already on top of that, thank you very much. I can't so much as breathe funny without him noticing. He re-vamped just to be my 24 hour guard dog, and I only need one of those." She placed my plate in the microwave, fingers flying over the buttons as she continued. "And while we're on the subject of my well-being, don't you dare think of running off again. This is your home, too, as much as it is ours. We've had bad water under the bridge but that's done. You belong here, with the family. Rule three – we stick together, thick or thin, and we need you now just as much as you need us."

Rose let me mull that over while the microwave did its thing. As we waited, she unconsciously took out her locket and rubbed its smooth golden surface under her fingers. Inside was a picture of our original Ben and his wife, Angela, on their wedding day. Ben had given Rose the locket as a surprise, and had it engraved, _"To my beloved Mother,"_ a phrase Rose had loved so much she'd rubbed it right off the surface of the metal over the years.

Seeing her fingers trace that familiar path was a reminder of the all-too-human reasons I couldn't stay.

"Rose, I can't stay here with you. I'm a danger to you and the baby both. If you want this to work – and you're insane for even trying, by the way – I have to go."

"Hush. You brought me my first baby, and I would forgive you anything after that. Even the most horrible thing you can think of. I can even forgive you for James," she said with a laugh, "and he's the most horrible thing I can think of!"

"Rose!"

"He was an unfaithful piece of murdering scum, and you deserve much better."

I sighed in acknowledgment. "Point taken." I did deserve better, but hadn't realized it until Italy had gone and blown up in my face. Literally. And that had made all the wasted decades putting up with James and putting distance between my family and I all the more painful to bear.

Rose handed me a hot, loaded plate and pointed at the kitchen table. "Sit. Eat. Now."

I took the plate from her and sat, listening as my stomach gurgled in response to the food smells coming toward me. "This is so weird."

"You get used to it." She filled a glass with water and sat down across from me. "Eat it."

I dug my fork into a pile of reheated mashed potatoes, grimacing at the grainy texture against my teeth. I didn't really want potatoes. I wanted blood. Buckets and buckets of delicious blood. Human blood. Animal blood. At this point, I would even guzzle the dregs of the worst vampire's blood. Anything to fix the hunger. But under this roof, I had to live by different rules, human or not human. That had been the original arrangement, and it worked because we stuck to it. With difficulty, I swallowed the potatoes. "Being human sucks, Rose."

She gave me a considering look and dropped her hand to her stomach. "There are trade-offs in everything, Tanya."

"Yes, but I didn't choose to make this trade," I said, poking my fork at a pile of steamed broccoli topped with cheese.

"You probably didn't choose to be a vampire, either," Rose replied. "It's just all you know."

"True. You're lucky you remember something from before," I said.

She made a face. "It's not that pleasant, having those memories. I'm glad they're faded, and a long time gone."

I nodded, but internally disagreed. My life had basically started in the woods, and I hadn't even known my own name. All the humanity I had was due to Ben, Emmett, and Rose. It hadn't taken much for James to strip that all away to bring out the monster in me again. He'd been so pleased at my viciousness and cunning as a hunter of anything that moved … so pleased right up until the end, that is.

I smiled grimly down into my plate and shoveled more food into my mouth. At least that chapter of my life was done. I wouldn't be able to forget it, but at least it was over.

"Speaking of the past …" Rose started, slowly. "Emmett mentioned you had some pictures that might be from before you were changed?"

I nodded, opened my mouth to speak, choked on my broccoli, gagged, and barely made it to the sink before I threw up. Rose clucked sympathetically, rubbing my back and holding my hair while I heaved. She flipped on the water to wash away more evidence that I wasn't hacking it as a human.

But I couldn't seem to stop throwing up. And my head was spinning. Everything seemed to be in motion. Nothing felt solid. My hands were sinking into the countertop holding me up like it was made out of butter, worthless for support.

Feeling myself falling, I threw a hand out to grab the sink faucet in front of me, only to watch in horror as it crumpled beneath my fingers. Water exploded out of the spout, boiling into my palm. Emmett snatched me away from it, pulling me up into his arms and away from the ruined faucet, away from the melted countertop, away from Rose.

As he took me out of the room, the haze of my change didn't hide Rose picking up her phone.

* * *

**More coming … eventually … I have to write someone out of a tree coming up here and it's been tricky. Reviewers find out who … and thanks everyone for hanging with me!**


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